Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreWith 90% of cybersecurity and risk leaders predicting they’ll see budget increases in 2025, many are facing a new era of accountability, with boards wanting to see solid returns on cybersecurity investments.That’s an elusive expectation to deliver on, given that 35.9% of a typical CISO’s budget is going for software. Knowing if, how, when and under what conditions a given cybersecurity software investment delivers a hard-number-based ROI is not easy to do, and such numbers of hard to prove.Clear budget wins do exist, though. They start with automating security operations center (SOC) workflows that are overwhelming analysts with too many conflicting alerts. Automating an endpoint detection and response system is one good place to start, with the goal of reducing alert fatigue in SOCs so analysts can focus on more complex threats and intrusion attempts. Another is automating patch management. CISOs need to move beyond trying to get this done manually with overextended teams, and automate it using the latest AI- and ML-based platforms purpose-built for optimizing patch management network-wide.Forrester’s “Budget Planning Guide 2025: Security and Risk” provides insights into why CISOs are seeing their budgets preserved when other areas of an organization are experiencing layoffs, budget cuts, and, in some cases, new programs being put on hold or canceled altogether. (Note, however, that cybersecurity budgets are, on average, just 5.7% of IT annual spending.)Gartner’s latest forecast update (4Q 2024) of end-user spending for information security reflects the resilience of CISOs’ budgets in the aggregate. These budgets are predicted to grow from $184 billion in 2024 to $294 billion in 2028, and Gartner forecasts the market will grow at a 12.43% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in four years. Security software is expected to be the fastest-growing segment, consistent with Forrester’s recent findings of CISO spending benchmarks. Gartner predicts spending on security software will grow from $59.9 billion in 2022 to $134.3 billion in 2028, attaining a CAGR of 14.4%.The 10 fastest-growing market segments are outperforming the aggregate market by a slim margin of 12.63%, with cloud security the fastest-growing segment, projected to attain a CAGR of 25.87% from 2024 to 2028. Stephanie Balaouras, Forrester vice president, group director, stated in a recent webinar, “When you think about AI, when you think about some of the novel threats that we’re looking at, when you think about post-quantum encryption, [and] the concerns about that, we are at this inflection point.” Gartner predicts that by 2028, 22% of cyberattacks and data leaks will involve generative AI.Boards aren’t stopping there. While they’re funding the realities of this inflection point by approving security budgets and, in some cases, increa
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
