How to Justify your Cybersecurity Budget
After years of heavy spending on security, boards and executives are increasingly concerned about the ROI of their cybersecurity budgets. This may be due in part to problems in communication between upper-level management and security professionals. Senior leaders aren’t always clear on how cybersecurity investments today can prevent cyberattacks in the future. At the same time, security leaders are often negligent in demonstrating how cybersecurity budgets align with business goals.
One reason for this disconnect between is a lack of quantitative, objective cyber security metrics that are easy to understand. Many metrics are too detailed to comprehend, too vague to matter, or lacking in meaningful context.
Bitsight can help. Bitsight Security Ratings provide a data-driven, dynamic measurement of the cybersecurity performance of an organization and its vendors. Armed with daily Bitsight ratings, security managers can facilitate data-driven conversations about security and risk with boards and executives while effectively justifying their cybersecurity budgets.
Five Ways to Justify a Cybersecurity Budget When Facing Cuts
As security managers face increasing scrutiny and shrinking budgets, these five strategies can help to justify the cybersecurity budgets they need to optimize cybersecurity planning to align to the broader goals of the business.
Understand risk to prioritize spending
To demonstrate ROI, security leaders need tools that deliver greater visibility into risk in their digital ecosystem. By identifying areas of highest or disproportionate risk, teams can prioritize security spending and introduce cyber risk reduction programs that will deliver fast and noticeable impact.
Use risk-based metrics to justify funding
Too often, security professionals provide senior leadership with metrics that aren’t correlated with business outcomes. By leveraging metrics that have a direct relationship to positive or negative outcomes, security teams can show that their work has potential to help the business grow, scale, and increase profitability. Metrics that correlate to the risk of data breaches are especially effective, as senior leadership is painfully aware of the potential cost of cyberattacks.
Benchmark performance to prioritize investments
By benchmarking the performance of their organization against peers and competitors, security managers can prioritize security efforts to achieve the highest impact while meeting or surpassing industry benchmarks.
Uncover risk in remote office networks
More employees are working remotely or from home today, significantly increasing the company’s attack surface and introducing new vulnerabilities. According to research, residential IPs account for more than 90% of all observed malware infections and compromised systems. Security managers can justify cybersecurity budgets by improving cyber risk management in remote operating and work from home environments.
Evaluate third-party risk more cost-effectively
Vendors and partners are often the weak link in a company’s security chain. Yet managing third-party risk can be labor-intensive and costly. With tools that significantly reduce the time and expense of onboarding, risk managers can promote business enablement while cost-effectively evaluating and mitigating risk.
