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Cybersecurity budget justification: A guide for CISOs

By Jerald Murphy

A well-justified cybersecurity budget demonstrates that security isn't a cost center but rather a strategic business enabler. This requires speaking the language of business: risk, impact and ROI, not just firewalls, endpoints and pathing.

As a CISO, framing your budget request in terms executives understand -- and care about -- is the key to moving from a defensive security posture to a value-driven strategy.

Cybersecurity budget justification challenges

Many cybersecurity budget requests fall short because they fail to resonate with the intended audience -- senior executives and boards. Avoid or account for the following common pitfalls when making your case:

• Lack of stakeholder education. Business leaders often do not fully understand cyber-risk or what it means for the bottom line. Failing to provide context or assuming shared knowledge can undermine the case for a given security investment. CISOs need to translate specific technical events and actions -- e.g., servers down and data lost -- into financial impact that is easy for CEOs and boards to understand.
• Overemphasis on tools and technologies. Lists of products, software licenses and threat feeds don't tell a strategic story. Avoid making the budget sound like a tech shopping list. A more effective technique is to take the products and services the security program needs and match them to specific business risks.
• Technical jargon. Acronyms like EDR, SIEM, MTTD and Mitre ATT&CK might excite security teams but likely mean little to nontechnical executives. Avoid jargon and translate technical benefits into business outcomes.
• No connection to business goals. CISOs must explicitly tie security spending to organizational risk appetite and enterprise priorities -- e.g., enabling cloud transformation, safeguarding customer trust or ensuring compliance.
• Reactive rather than proactive justification. Justifying new spending only after a data breach or security audit finding creates a perception that cybersecurity as a discipline is reactive and associated expenses are avoidable. Instead, frame security as an investment that yields business dividends.
• Ignoring benchmarking. Without comparing your security program to industry peers' and against formal cybersecurity benchmarking guidelines, your budget requests might appear arbitrary or inflated. Plenty of publicly available studies and recommendations can provide valuable context for security budget justification.

Don't rely solely on public standards, however. Consider also creating metrics that make sense internally, then track how those metrics improve over time.

Strategies to justify your cybersecurity budget

Rather than relying on fear-based appeals or laundry lists of threats, use the following evidence-based strategies to build a persuasive case for your cybersecurity budget.

Present a risk assessment

First, present a business-aligned cybersecurity risk assessment. Then, quantify cyber-risks in terms of likelihood and impact to critical business functions -- not just IT systems. Show how proposed investments would reduce those risks.

Demonstrate ROI through cyber-risk scenarios

In some instances, it might be useful to estimate ROI by comparing the costs of cybersecurity initiatives to the potential costs of likely data breaches, regulatory fines or operational disruptions.

That said, while it's tempting to highlight the biggest hypothetical costs avoided by implementing security investments -- such as damages from a massive ransomware attack -- most business leaders discount the value of money not lost through good security.

That is why, in this context, it is helpful to model cyber-risk scenarios. Present side-by-side comparisons of budget scenarios -- e.g., baseline vs. enhanced security -- to illustrate tradeoffs in terms of exposure, impact and likelihood.

Use benchmarks

As mentioned earlier, it is smart to benchmark your company's security performance against its peers. Use publicly available data or analyst research to show how the cybersecurity program compares to companies of similar industries, sizes and regulatory environments.

It is also always useful to highlight compliance and regulatory alignment. Emphasize how budgeted controls support cybersecurity maturity models and IT security frameworks, such as the following:

• NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.
• ISO 27001.
• Sector-specific mandates, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS and Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures.

Demonstrate business alignment

Finally, showcase how security investments directly enable the business and its specific strategic goals. For example, a CISO might demonstrate how cybersecurity initiatives reduce friction in digital initiatives, enable secure remote work or help accelerate time to market.

Key metrics to include in a cybersecurity budget

To reinforce your request, supplement your proposal with clear, business-relevant security metrics that demonstrate current performance, forecast improvements or benchmark against goals.

Metrics should help illustrate a coherent narrative that justifies the cybersecurity budget. It bears repeating: Explicitly tie key performance indicators to business objectives and outcomes. Don't get lost in the technical weeds, or you'll risk losing your audience.

With that caveat, consider how the following metrics could help support your case:

• Risk reduction percentage. Represents how much an identified risk decreases after a given investment.
• Risk score. A numeric value that represents a company's cyber-risk levels.
• Security score. A numeric value that represents a company's security posture.
• Cost per incident. Conveys the average cost of a security incident.
• Mean time to detect. An indicator of incident response maturity that measures the time it takes to detect a security incident.
• Mean time to respond. An indicator of incident response maturity that measures the time it takes to respond to a security incident.
• Mean time to contain. An indicator of incident response maturity that measures the time it takes to contain a security incident.
• Compliance score. Represents the percentage of audit controls met and regulatory milestones achieved.
• Security-related downtime. Quantifies lost productivity or revenue tied to security events.
• ROI. Assesses the monetary benefit of implementing security controls.
• Percentage of IT budget spent on security. Helps put security budget in perspective, within the context of wider spending. A reasonable range for a mature enterprise would typically be 7% to 15%.

Cybersecurity budgets are no longer just technical wish lists; they are strategic tools for reducing risk, ensuring regulatory compliance and fostering digital resilience. To gain executive and board support, cybersecurity leaders must tie budget requests to tangible business outcomes, clearly explain the risks investments would address and support their claims with hard data. By shifting the conversation from cost to value -- and from threats to opportunities -- security practitioners can position their teams as indispensable partners in the enterprise's long-term success.

Jerald Murphy is senior vice president of research and consulting with Nemertes Research. With more than three decades of technology experience, Murphy has worked on a range of technology topics, including neural networking research, integrated circuit design, computer programming and global data center design. He was also the CEO of a managed services company.