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.
Maximizing Cybersecurity Budgets with Bitsight
Bitsight offers the most widely adopted Security Ratings solution in the industry. With Bitsight’s suite of cybersecurity and risk management technologies, companies can solve their most complex cyber risk challenges.
Bitsight Security Ratings are the foundation for all Bitsight solutions. Providing a dynamic, data-driven measurement of an organization’s security performance, Bitsight ratings provide greater security visibility and enable security managers to proactively identify, quantify, and manage cyber security risk throughout their ecosystem.
Unlike existing security tools that conduct periodic scans or rely on subjective cyber risk assessments, Bitsight Security Ratings continuously measure security performance based on evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. Bitsight Security Ratings are generated daily through the analysis of externally observable data in an outside-in approach that requires no information from the rated entity. With Bitsight ratings, organizations can monitor third- and fourth-party risk, make data-driven risk decisions with greater speed and effectiveness, and engage stakeholders in data-driven conversations about risk and security.
Bitsight Solutions for Cybersecurity and Risk Management
Bitsight’s technology provides the quantitative, objective, and continuous metrics that security leaders need to justify their cybersecurity budget. Bitsight solutions include:
- Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management. Bitsight immediately exposes cyber risk within supply chains, focusing budgets and resources to achieve measurable cyber risk reduction. With a view of the riskiest issues impacting vendors, risk managers can optimize third-party risk management programs with the cybersecurity budgets they have today.
- Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Bitsight enables security and risk leaders to accurately measure the performance of their programs and align investments and budgets with actions that produce the highest impact over time. With Bitsight, security professionals can efficiently allocate limited cybersecurity budgets to the most critical areas of cyber risk within the organization.
- Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. Bitsight delivers a clear view of the attack surface, the assets within it, and the associated risks. By identifying areas of disproportionate risk, security teams can better prioritize remediation efforts.
- Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking. Security leaders rely on Bitsight to assess and monitor their cybersecurity posture, benchmark their performance against competitors and peers, and report results to senior leadership more clearly and effectively.
- Bitsight Security Ratings for Executive Reporting. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities facilitate data-driven conversations to help teams communicate more effectively about security and risk. With Bitsight cyber risk reports, security leaders can identify gaps in security controls and programs and determine where to focus cybersecurity budgets for the highest impact on performance.
Why choose Bitsight?
Bitsight has been transforming the way companies manage cybersecurity and risk since 2011. As the most widely adopted security rating service in the world, Bitsight continuously monitors large pools of objective and independently verified data to deliver actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks.
More than 2,100+ customers, including some of the world’s largest organizations, rely on Bitsight to provide a clearer picture of their security posture. Bitsight is the choice of 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 20% of the world’s countries, and 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers. Bitsight is also used by 4 of the top 5 investment banks and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.