How to Secure Cybersecurity Budget Approval with Continuous Security Validation

When it comes to enterprise cybersecurity, it’s not enough for organizations to simply implement security controls, defenses, and policies. While these measures are critical to protect the organization from threats and threat actors, they cannot ensure ongoing protection against constantly evolving and increasingly sophisticated threats alone. To stay ahead of adversaries and their cyber-weapons of mass destruction, companies must also continuously test existing controls against real-world threats.

Using offensive testing techniques like continuous pentesting, red teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), in alignment with the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, firms can proactively and continuously understand how their current controls perform against real-world threats. Most importantly, they can use these insights to determine where gaps and blind spots exist and fix them before adversaries have a chance to exploit them.

Knowing that security gaps exist and how to patch them is one thing, but getting a budget approved to implement these patches can be a challenge. This blog will explore how technical security practitioners and leaders can leverage insights from offensive security tools to secure cybersecurity budget approval from senior business leaders.

The Challenges of Getting Cybersecurity Budget Approval from Top Leadership

Per IBM, cybersecurity is no longer considered a “technical issue managed by IT departments. Rather, it “dominates concerns among the C-suite.”¹ Another recent survey names “cyber incidents” as the #1 global business risk.² These findings indicate the rising profile of cybersecurity and underscore that it is well on its way to becoming a strategic imperative and leadership priority.

Despite this, security staff in many organizations struggle to get cybersecurity budgets approved by senior leaders. Reasons for this include:

• They are unable to quantify the business benefits and “ROI” of cybersecurity investments.
• A false sense of security may exist within the organization (“we won’t be targets”), creating the perception that further investments are not required.
• Cybersecurity is viewed as a cost center since it often requires ongoing spending and doesn’t directly contribute to revenues or profits.
• Limited overall budgets and other organizational imperatives push security down on the priority list.

Security teams can overcome these constraints and have an easier time getting leadership to approve cybersecurity budgets with the help of modern continuous security validation tools like Adversarial Exposure Validation platforms.

How AEV and Continuous Pentesting Help Secure Cybersecurity Budget Approval

At a basic level, continuous pentesting continuously discovers vulnerabilities and exposures across the enterprise attack surface, while Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) autonomously demonstrates how real attackers would chain those vulnerabilities together to breach an organization’s systems. Together, these capabilities deliver real-time, end-to-end visibility into not only which assets are left vulnerable, but how well existing controls actually function in the event of an attack.

From a budget approval standpoint, the insights from these tools give security leaders the data they need to translate technical risk to business risk for senior leadership. They can use these insights to:

• Demonstrate the ROI of existing cybersecurity investments by showing which controls are performing well, which are failing, and how those failures translate into measurable business risk.
• Justify budget increases to fund the implementation of new controls or other remediation efforts by illustrating how critical and high-risk vulnerabilities could directly impact operations, continuity, revenue, compliance, or reputation.
• Prioritize high-value security spending by mapping vulnerabilities to real attack paths to show where investments would reduce risk the most for the least cost.
• Align cybersecurity strategy with business goals using evidence-backed metrics like reduced risk exposure, shorter mean time to remediate (MTTR), and validated reductions in incident likelihood and impact.

With continuous pentesting and AEV, security teams have a unique opportunity to reframe budget requests from opinion-based “we think we need this” requests to evidence-based requests focused on business impact, dramatically increasing the likelihood of leadership approval.

Best Practices to Secure Cybersecurity Budget Approval with Continuous Security Validation

As we have seen, many business leaders understand the need for cybersecurity but are hesitant to approve new cybersecurity investments. Security teams can overcome this hurdle and get budgets approved by adopting these best practices.

1. Create a Business Case

Creating a business case for new investments means speaking the “language” of business leaders. To get leaders to approve the cybersecurity budget, it’s not enough to explain how a new security tool or control could strengthen enterprise security. Security teams also need to demonstrate how the tool could positively impact the business.

Often, security practitioners are already aware of critical issues in their systems that need to be fixed purely based on their expertise and knowledge of their architecture, but this alone doesn’t typically resonate with business leaders when it comes to approving cybersecurity budget. However, demonstrating how a new investment could prevent adversaries from breaching a revenue-generating asset makes for a much more compelling case that increases the likelihood of budget approval.

A solid business case positions new investments as business enablers, rather than as business expenses. This gives leaders a strong reason to approve the cybersecurity budget quickly and with minimal changes.

2. Perform a Cost-Benefit Analysis

AEV tools, specifically, due to their ability to execute and validate viable attack paths, can help security personnel estimate the potential benefits of a new investment in terms of risk reduction, cost savings, and avoided losses. This information can be compared with its estimated cost to demonstrate its potential security value per dollar spent. Such cost-benefit analyses enable organizations to choose high-value controls that are likely to strengthen the security posture the most and provide decision-makers with useful information to help them approve new investments.

3. Reference Key Cybersecurity Frameworks

Cybersecurity frameworks like ISO 27001 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework provide industry-recognized standards for strong cybersecurity in an organization. Mapping penetration testing and AEV findings to these frameworks can give security teams an objective, third-party benchmark to demonstrate areas where controls don’t meet the standards of a particular framework.

Combining missed framework requirements with real-world vulnerability and exposure data from pentesting and AEV creates a strong narrative for executives to follow. By tying investment requests directly to these widely respected cybersecurity frameworks, security leaders can reframe the conversation from polite suggestions to evidence-backed, standard, and compliance-driven priorities that the organization must address. This external validation makes budget requests far more credible and helps senior leadership make informed, confident decisions about where to allocate resources.

Boost Your Cyber Resilience with BreachLock

BreachLock’s Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), and continuous pentesting solutions can all serve as valuable tools for security teams to help identify, prioritize, and validate vulnerabilities and exposures across your entire attack surface and give you the evidence-backed insights you need to secure the budget to strengthen your defenses.

All integrated into the BreachLock Unified Platform under a common data model, BreachLock’s offensive security solutions give security teams a clear understanding of:

• Which vulnerabilities matter most
• Which controls are failing and passing
• How adversaries could chain vulnerabilities together to reach critical assets
• Which patches should be prioritized for implementation to reduce risk.

With BreachLock, organizations can proactively validate that defenses are working as intended, prioritize high-impact remediation efforts, and confidently invest in the right controls to reduce real-world risk.

Discover how BreachLock can help you strengthen your security ecosystem and secure the budget you need to stay ahead of threats. Schedule a discovery call with an expert today!

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in offensive security, delivering scalable and continuous security testing. Trusted by global enterprises, BreachLock provides human-led and AI-powered Attack Surface Management, Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Red Teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions that help security teams stay ahead of adversaries.

With a mission to make proactive security the new standard, BreachLock is shaping the future of cybersecurity through automation, data-driven intelligence, and expert-driven execution.

Know Your Risk. Contact BreachLock today!

References

1. IBM. Cybersecurity dominates concerns among the C-suite, small businesses, and the nation. https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/cybersecurity-dominates-concerns-c-suite-small-businesses-nation

2. Allianz (2024). Allianz Risk Barometer. https://commercial.allianz.com/content/dam/onemarketing/commercial/commercial/reports/Allianz-Risk-Barometer-2024.pdf

Author

BreachLock Labs