Security leaders are increasingly being asked to do more with less. In-house capabilities don't scale fast enough to keep up. 

Business leaders are cutting costs across the board in preparation for a potential recession. Business units that were used to receiving ample funding are hitting limits to near-term growth. Organizations that used to fund ambitious growth targets for tech integration and cybersecurity are starting to cut back. 

These boundaries are likely to stay in place for some time, regardless of the bigger economic picture. Business leaders find themselves under pressure to demonstrate that they're capable of guiding their organizations through difficult periods. They're right to scrutinize expenditures they might not have given a second glance to only a few years ago. 

A Challenging Path for Cybersecurity Growth Lies Ahead 

Additional scrutiny can make life challenging for security leaders and their teams. Economic downturns don't reduce security risks – in fact, they're more likely to have the opposite effect. Security leaders need to find ways to grow their security capabilities without putting additional strain on the organization's balance sheet. 

Many of the go-to strategies that security leaders relied on in the past won't work anymore. Hiring new talent and deploying costly high-maintenance technologies won't fix the problems that today' security teams face. 

Hiring New Security Talent May Not Be the Answer 

The cybersecurity talent gap remains near its all-time high. Qualified applicants still demand generous compensation packages, but the terms are changing. Stock-based compensation doesn't mean quite as much in a high-interest-rate environment with a potential recession on the horizon. 

This presents clear challenges to security leaders who aim for 24x7 detection and response performance. Hiring a single top-tier analyst is hard enough; round-the-clock protection requires a team of at least eight analysts. 

In theory, reducing the tightness of the labor market should lead more tech professionals to pursue cybersecurity careers, releasing some of the pressure from the industry' imbalance of supply and demand. But in practice, organizations are reluctant to hire new tech talent in an uncertain economic environment. 

Tech Consolidation is a Top Priority 

In a robust economy, growing enterprises with easy access to capital can afford to invest in the latest and greatest security technologies on the market. It' relatively easy to overlook technical redundancies and feature overlaps, at least in the short term. 

But in an uncertain economy, IT bloat in security leads to costly, unsustainable inefficiencies. Business leaders who stake their reputation on identifying and eliminating waste will carefully review security expenditures. Security leaders need to be proactive about consolidating their tech stack and deploying efficient, economically sustainable solutions for managing their budgets. 

At the same time, security leaders need to explain the downside revenue risks that insufficient security poses to the organization. 

• Data breaches have clear and quantifiable financial impacts. Experts predict the average cost of a data breach to surpass $5 million by the end of 2023. 
• Intellectual property theft can impact profitability models in unexpected ways over time. Intellectual property theft is responsible for at least $72 billion in losses globally. This figure swells to more than $100 billion when counterfeit electronics are included. 
• Loss of trust can severely impact customer loyalty, employee turnover, and marketing effectiveness. A June 2022 PwC report suggests that most executives overestimate the level of trust people have in their companies, exposing them to security-related downside risk. 
• Fines and penalties for non-compliance with security regulations can quickly snowball into large payouts. Many federal and state regulations assess penalties on a per-record basis, which amplifies the cost of large-scale data breaches involving millions of records. 

Effective Cost Management Frameworks Should Prioritize Cybersecurity 

According to Gartner, only 35% of organizations have a consistent cost management framework that extends to cybersecurity in place. Without this framework in place, cost-conscious executives are likely to cut spending in ways that increase business costs and reduce efficiency. Scheduled technology refreshes and upcoming contract renewals are among the easiest targets. 

Security leaders must gain board member support by consulting them when verifying the value of technology expenditure and pushing back against counterproductive technology budget cuts. That means gathering meaningful data, quantifying security risks, and making a well-supported case to strengthen cybersecurity budgets using reliable, industry-standard benchmarks to obtain buy-in from the board. 

Deploy Scalable Security Capabilities with Managed Detection and Response 

Managed detection and response services enable security leaders to expand their capabilities without hiring new talent while leveraging specialized product expertise to address IT bloat. This creates a streamlined security workflow capable of meeting ambitious growth demands even in difficult economic environments. 

Security leaders who partner with Lumifi providers gain access to experienced analysts using sophisticated tools and streamlined workflows. Our analysts act as an extension of the existing security team, enabling cost-saving automation while giving internal security team members the freedom to engage in proactive strategic work. 

Let Lumifi's SIEM expertise guide your organization through the process of managing scalable growth and driving efficiencies across your security tech stack.

Schedule a demo to learn more about how Lumifi approach can help.