We always look to give you expert guidance on the most pressing topics in cyber security. Whether your organisation is navigating new challenges, optimising your current strategies, or exploring ways to future-proof your organisation’s defences, our vCISOs are here to support you every step of the way.
As the party poppers, resolutions and the new year approaches, our vCISOs have been tackling a critical subject for 2025: budgeting for cyber security. From this article, you will gain insights into how to build a risk-based security budget, understand the challenges and opportunities it addresses, and how to avoid common pitfalls. These expert recommendations are designed to help you prioritise your security needs effectively, while ensuring alignment with your business goals.
Why is security budgeting an important activity for all organisations?
Many organisations will be familiar with using a budget as a financial planning tool to monitor income and expenses, and to guide operational decisions. The security budget is very similar in its objectives; however, a good security budget should be risk-based. The foundational activity for any security budget should be a risk assessment of the organisation’s objectives and goals. The assessment should answer the following questions: what are the security risks to the organisation’s goals? How likely is the risk to the organisation? What risks have the highest implications? The security budget should include the financial costs of mitigating the highest priority risks to the acceptable levels, as set by the organisation’s executive management team.
What challenges should a security budget address?
Budgets are financial forecasting tools; therefore they aim to address estimated and future projected expenses. Often, organisations have long term and short term budgets; the later a subset of the former and used to ensure the projections in the former are realistically met. Similarly, security budgets should contain the most pressing security needs, with the highest impact in supporting the organisational goals. Additional areas within the organisation should budget to include initiatives aimed at understanding the impact of emerging threats, addressing resource challenges, improving visibility, enhancing security awareness and culture, or acquiring new security tooling.
How should the security budget be structured?
Every budget should cover both operating and capital expense. Operational expense items can include licence renewals, 3rd party support contract renewals, upgrades and replacements, ongoing regulatory security requirements – penetration testing or IT DR tests or annual business continuity testing, planning for security incidents – getting an incident response retainer or cyber insurance. Capital expense items can include spend for security projects, new security tooling and other expenses for new security initiatives.
What is the best approach for preparing a security budget?
The most effective security budget is a risk-based budget – by not planning to purchase the latest security trending tool, but projects and initiatives that address key security risks and support core business objectives. Therefore, do research into the business objectives and strategies for the new year – anticipate the positive and negative security risks of each objective. Translate the identified risks to projects and initiatives that will mitigate and optimise the negative and positive impact of the security risks respectively. Additional areas worth considering include the implication of emerging regulations: NIS 2, DORA, and AI regulations, and new technology trends such as Quantum computing, among others. Shape the narrative around the security team by being your organisation’s partner, provide the technologies that enables the business to achieve their objectives and goals in a secure and safe manner.
Another effective approach is consulting with your vendors to identify opportunities to optimise the usage of existing tooling, where cost savings might be identified especially with cloud costs. Redcentric hosted a webinar this month on optimising the public cloud by effective governance; watch here.
What are some common mistakes when preparing a security budget?
Underestimating the importance of assessing your internal stakeholders, especially the executive team with budgetary approval responsibilities. The security budget should clearly demonstrate an understanding of their priorities. Are they planning for a year of cost cutting or aggressive growth? The security budget should accurately reflect their leanings by significant cost savings or increased project spend, respectively. In addition, undocumented business justification for the proposed security initiatives and projects is a common mistake. The executive team would likely prefer to know the demonstrable value of the security initiatives to the business. The risk treatment plan can be excellent and useful tool especially if it already has executive team approval.
How can Redcentric help?
The virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) service is a tested approach to implementing and improving security strategies, programmes and operations. Typically embedded remotely within an organisation’s team, the vCISO supports organisations in assessing their risk profile and threat landscape, identifying security controls to mitigate or optimise the risk exposure, maintaining compliance with appropriate regulations, and supporting in planning for future security strategy. The vCISO service can be utilised to provide advice on specific security challenges such as security budgeting, or specific project initiatives, and is available on a per-use or per-subscription basis, therefore it is cost-effective.
We can help you to prepare a well-structured security budget, and can empower your organisation to mitigate risks, navigate emerging threats, and leverage opportunities – all with the expert support services included within Redcentric’s vCISO. Book a meeting here.
