A life-cycle perspective is a way of thinking about risk across every stage of an asset, service, or process: sourcing, design, deployment, use, maintenance, and end-of-life. In cyber security, it means security is not treated as a one-time setup problem. Instead, teams consider how a system is procured, configured, updated, monitored, retired, and disposed of, because weaknesses can appear at any stage.
This matters because attackers often target the weakest point in the chain, such as unvetted suppliers, insecure software updates, forgotten test systems, or devices that were not wiped before disposal. Defenders use the same perspective to build controls into procurement, identity management, patching, logging, backup, and decommissioning. It also supports supply-chain security and asset governance by making responsibilities and evidence traceable from acquisition to destruction.