7 Ways to Maximize Your Security Dollars

Organizations are under growing pressure to extract more value from their IT security dollars.

Many have had to sharply increase their security spending in recent years to address new threats and meet compliance requirements. The proportion of the IT budget that is allocated to security has grown steadily at many organizations and now averages over 5.6%, according to Gartner. Some spend as much as 13% of their overall IT budget on security, the analyst firm has noted.

Gartner expects that businesses and governments worldwide will spend over $96 billion on cybersecurity this year compared to around $84 billion last year. Much of that spending is being driven by data breach concerns and attacks like the WannaCry and NotPetya pandemics of 2017.

"According to our quantitative research, over 40% of organizations are increasing their security spend against only 4% lowering it," says Daniel Kennedy, an analyst with 451 Research. "The most significant organizational change security teams are making is trying to add people, and having a hard time doing it because of a lack of available talent at certain salary levels."

Cutting security spending in the present threat landscape can be extremely challenging for most organizations. The question is about how to meet all your security requirements given budget and resource constraints, Kennedy says.

Here are seven tips for getting more from your security dollars: