Guide to Planning and Allocating a Cybersecurity Budget
Summary
A practical guide to cybersecurity budgeting recommends basing spending on an organization’s risk profile, reviewing current tools and costs, prioritizing key protections, and planning for incident response.
Key points
- Cybersecurity spending averages 10.9% of IT budgets, but the article says benchmarks should be starting points rather than targets.
- Assess risk exposure and inventory existing tools and spending before deciding where to allocate funds.
- The guide highlights endpoint protection, identity security, security awareness training, SIEM and log management, compliance, and incident response.
- Align funding with the organization’s most significant risks and consider managed services when building in-house 24/7 security operations is impractical.
- It recommends reserving 5–10% of the security budget for unexpected incident response costs.
- To gain leadership support, explain security spending in terms of business risk, financial impact, coverage gaps, and ongoing investment.
Article Details
- Topic
- Cybersecurity budget planning, including spending benchmarks, cost allocation, risk-based prioritization, and leadership buy-in.
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