Operational overhead is the ongoing work required to keep a system secure and reliable: setup, policy tuning, monitoring, updates, troubleshooting, and user support. In cyber security, this matters because a tool that looks strong on paper can fail in practice if it is too hard to run consistently. More overhead often means more chances for misconfiguration, delayed patching, and gaps between policy and reality.
Attackers benefit when teams are overloaded. A wireless platform with complex VLANs, inconsistent administration, or too many manual steps can leave weak segmentation, stale credentials, or forgotten access rules in place. Defenders use the term when comparing products and deciding whether a control is realistic for their staff. Lower operational overhead can improve security by making good practices easier to sustain, but only if the system still enforces the needed controls.