Maximising Security Investments: A CISO’s Guide to Budget Optimisation & Technology Consolidation

Economic pressures have been leading to greater budget scrutiny and justification of resources for cybersecurity teams. Boards are asking harder questions around cyber risk and exposure. Not only are CISOs working hard to justify and measure their program, they’ve had to become more data-driven in the way they align investments towards company outcomes and business objectives. And they’re doing it all amidst an unstable economy, a fluctuating business environment, and a rapidly expanding threat and technology landscape—with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Quantum Computing.

As economic pressures continue to increase, cybersecurity leaders are expected to work more strategically with their resources and look at the ROI of their technology investments to get the most out of their solutions. When tackling the strategy around budget scrutiny and technology consolidations, CISOs need to pay attention to three key areas when choosing which solutions to continue investing in, or how to work differently with what they have.

3 Efficiencies to Watch for When Consolidating Technology

The board of directors and key stakeholders are putting CISOs under greater scrutiny, and not just with cyber risk outcomes. It isn’t just about CISOs needing to pull back on new software and services they may find valuable to their tech stack. It’s also about potentially pulling out on software renewals that may not be fitting the bill, or using a solution they already have that provides similar capabilities and features.

As CISOs look to consolidate technology, there are three efficiencies to consider:

1. Data efficiencies. When using multiple solutions, sometimes the data outputs don’t match up. For example, if a team is using one product for their governance and security analytics purposes, and another product to manage their attack surface, the data feeding into each might not completely align. This discrepancy puts CISOs in a tough predicament when sharing insights and results with the board or stakeholders. But if the same tool covers use cases for governance and external exposure, all the data concepts and outputs will be familiar to the stakeholders.
2. Operational efficiencies. When a cybersecurity team is operationalizing their processes with vendors and technologies, some of the tools may have multiple capabilities they aren’t utilizing. If CISOs can consolidate capabilities spread throughout multiple tools into one (or even a few), then the corresponding processes become much easier to manage.
3. Cost efficiencies. This goes without saying, but the easiest way to save on cost is to avoid investing in multiple tools when one can do the capabilities of several. Also consider that investing in fewer tools alleviates costs with training and onboarding, maintenance, and management.

Budgeting and Technology Consolidation

As CISOs begin consolidating technology and looking for ways to cut spend, they must consider what data, operational, and cost efficiencies they stand to gain with each solution. The vendors that bubble to the top should be able to solve for multiple use cases with trusted outputs and insights that CISOs can take action on.

Bitsight’s cyber risk management solution provides CISOs with efficiencies in all three areas:

1. Data efficiency. Bitsight delivers the most extensive cyber risk data in the market, with a consistency in data amongst a variety of use cases—from cyber governance and analytics to external attack surface to monitoring supply chain risk. CISOs already familiar with Bitsight’s applications and cyber performance metrics (such as our 25 risk vectors) can spend more time talking about performance and less time translating it.
2. Operational efficiency. Bitsight provides applications to streamline governance, monitoring, external attack surface management, cyber risk quantification, and vendor risk management. In addition, Bitsight provides a managed services option to manage these applications rather than hiring additional headcount or shuffling resources. By consolidating use cases into one vendor, with the ability to scale up or down during peak times, CISOs simplify their operational processes.
3. Cost efficiency. Once again, the cost efficiencies of using one vendor for multiple use cases instead of several vendors for each unique use case are obvious. Bitsight also enables security teams to get more capabilities for less with our unique packaging options.

Save Budget—Or Justify More

Bitsight empowers CISOs to gain valuable insights into data, creating opportunities for operational and cost efficiencies to justify initiatives and tell their cybersecurity story.

Whether for additional budget and buy-in for projects or justifying consolidation decisions, CISOs use Bitsight as part of their budgeting purposes by visualizing the risk burndown of proposed security investments and the financial risk of not allocating funds to certain areas of our security program.

With this data, cybersecurity teams can confidently determine whether they are spending money in the right places and the impacts of those investments on their security posture. For instance, a lot of our customers use Bitsight’s Cyber Risk Quantification to right-size their insurance—if you don’t have a sense of how much risk you have, you might not buy enough insurance or you may be over purchasing.

Hear how the Chief Information Security Officer of The Howard Hughes Corporation is leveraging Bitsight’s unified solution to tackle third-party cyber risk.