Government
75.3- Cohort
- 23,330 · Government
- Median
- High
Secrecy lasting decades, long procurement cycles, and critical infrastructure: why the public sector concentrates the highest structural exposure on the ruler.
Sectors
One ruler, five readings.
The operational ruler covers 15 sectors in the engine taxonomy. Five of them have a reading of their own here, chosen because they concentrate the decisions that reach GWK. The rest take part in comparisons but have no page.
01Cohorts
What separates one sector from another
Not organization size, nor the security budget. It is data shelf life: the longer a piece of information must stay secret, the greater the chance that the cryptography protecting it today will not protect it through that whole term.
On the operational ruler, the median time horizon ranges from 0.21 to 0.96 across sectors — the highest is 4.5 times the lowest.
Healthcare
69.3- Cohort
- 42,096 · Healthcare
- Median
- High
Medical records do not expire, devices outlive their software cycles, and interoperability multiplies the surface: the structure of exposure in healthcare.
Industry
63.1- Cohort
- 67,121 · Critical industry
- Median
- High
Intellectual property with decades of value, operational technology that cannot stop, and a manufacturer chain that sets the possible pace of migration.
Finance
51.3- Cohort
- 25,826 · Finance
- Median
- Moderate
Data that must stay secret for decades, legacy that does not migrate by configuration, and a third-party chain that carries part of the exposure.
Technology
26.9- Cohort
- 30,833 · SaaS
- Median
- Low
The sector with the lowest structural exposure on the ruler — and the largest observable surface. Why those two facts do not contradict each other.
02Provenance
The three numbers on this site, and why they differ
- Five: sectors with a reading of their own on this site — an editorial choice, not a property of the ruler.
- 15: sectors in the engine taxonomy, which is the operational ruler comparisons are made against.
- Seventeen: sectors in IEQ Technical Report 2026-S1, published on Zenodo under an open license. A different collection, cutoff, and taxonomy.
What this comparison is measured against
- Cutoff date
- July 12, 2026
- Run
- producao_324k_20260712
- Population
- 316,911 companies
- Sectors
- 15 sectors in the engine taxonomy
- Anonymity floor
- K = 30
Limits of the comparison
- The ruler is a static reference base, not a continuous measurement: there is no automatic update between one run and the next.
- Comparison is always against anonymous aggregates, never against another organization's individual result.
- A public-mode result does not compare to a complete-mode result, because the two readings start from different kinds of evidence.