Security Year-end Approaches: How To Maximize Your Cyber Spend
December budget conversations follow a predictable pattern. You have unspent funds, a list of security gaps, and pressure to show progress before the fiscal year closes. The question isn't whether to spend; it's how to spend in ways that reduce real risk and build momentum for next year's requests.
Skip the vendor wish lists and conference-circuit buzzwords. Instead, focus your remaining budget on investments that deliver measurable security improvements and create defensible audit trails for future funding discussions.
Start with exposures that directly threaten your operations, customer data, or regulatory compliance. A vulnerability in your customer-facing authentication system outweighs a theoretical attack chain that requires three separate compromises to exploit.
Then, map potential incidents to business consequences.
Finally, rank your security gaps by the impact they create, not the fear they generate. Severity scores and threat intelligence reports provide context, but your finance and legal teams understand business risk better than CVSS ratings. And they're the ones you need to convince anyway.
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Weak credentials and excessive access rights create the openings that attackers exploit most frequently. But the good news is that identity-focused controls can help you significantly reduce your risks within weeks.
To reap the rewards of identity-first investments, focus on:
Year-end budget pressure tempts teams to purchase platforms they won't configure until Q2. Resist that trap. Instead, buy engagements that produce actionable results.
These kinds of engagements cost less than most software licenses and generate documentation that strengthens next year's budget requests.
Source: BleepingComputer
