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> the risk of failing the compliance checkbox it satisfies is paramount.

i'm curios as to what compliance is there to be satisfied to necessitate such a hardcore measure?

There's a reasonable number of circumstances where there are cybersecurity standards that get imposed on organisations: insurance, from a customer, or from the government (especially if they are a customer). These standards are usually fairly reasonably written, but they are also necessarily vague and say stuff like "have a risk assessment", and "take industry-standard precautions". This vagueness can create a kind of escalation ratchet: when people tasked with (or responsible for) compliance are risk-averse and/or lazy, they will essentially just try to find as many precautions as they can find and throw them all in blanket-style, because it's the easiest and safest way to say that you're in compliance. This is especiallly true when you can more or less just buy one or two products which promise to basically tick every possible box. And if something else pops up as a suggestion, they'll throw that in too. Which then becomes the new 'industry standard', and it becomes harder to justify not doing it, and so on.

I worked in orgs where customers put a certain security standard in the contract. So if you fail that you are kind of in breach of contract

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