Partner content Cybersecurity executives and their teams are under constant pressure and scrutiny. As the barrier to entry for attackers gets lower, organizations need to improve their defenses. As businesses get leaner, so do their security teams. There are increasingly high expectations and increasingly tougher challenges to meet them across people, processes, and platforms.
In a recent survey conducted by SANS, 47% of participants across security functions flagged budget as a top concern in 2025. Funding new security headcount or tooling is challenging, especially when explaining complex technical needs to C-suite executives focused on business outcomes.
Security controls are your first line of defense against breaches and data leaks that can result in ransom costs, reputational harm, legal penalties, or even costly downtime. Yet to gain leadership approval, you need to reframe cybersecurity not as a technical expense but as a critical business enabler.
Position to the relevant priorities and language
Before presenting your case, you must first understand what matters to your board. While your focus may be on attack vectors and patch management, board members are more interested in risk, revenue, reputation, and regulatory compliance.
Boards often have one primary question in mind: How does this impact the business? To properly frame potential investments, tailor your pitch to emphasize the financial and reputational risks this control works to mitigate.
- Financial impact: Connect potential breaches to tangible costs like downtime, lost customer trust, and regulatory fines.
- Reputational harm: Highlight how data breaches damage brand trust and can lead to lost customers.
- Compliance issues: Reference any relevant or key regulations like GDPR, SOC, or CCPA to show how investments align with necessary regulatory requirements.
Frame these in the context of the investment itself. How did the proposed email security tool meet these standards? Was the tool you want to replace used by a competitor that suffered a breach? Or does the one you want to replace it with offer new capabilities to mitigate a known risk in your organization such as a high phishing rate?
Find the business outcomes in security investments
While your board is interested in a security investment's broader business impact, the discussion needn't focus purely on the dangers of not investing. That angle doesn't always capture why it's valuable.
How can you describe the value of a security control beyond pure defense? Consider what that tool does for your teams:
- Increased efficiency: With proper security controls in place, security teams spend less time dealing with a particular threat or alert, maximizing their time.
- Reduced costs: By investing in this particular security tool, you're able to reduce costs elsewhere such as future headcount, insurance premiums, or platform consolidation.
- Competitive advantage: With this tool in place, your teams are better positioned to sell or service customers.
Some security tools make this easy, framing their solution not against security outcomes, but business outcomes. Vanta and Thoropass don't just sell compliance automation tools, they sell sales enablement platforms that get you compliant for enterprise procurement. Okta isn't just an identity management tool, it facilitates seamless onboarding and access to tools for new employees.
Establish the long-term value of an investment
Beyond the here and now, it's essential to communicate long-term value to your board, because it ties directly to the outcomes above. Cost savings over time make an upfront investment more palatable. Similarly, security investments should be framed as a resilience measure. Today's cost outweighs the compounding risk of inaction.
Regardless of the circumstance, your proposed investment can be framed against short- and long-term business needs, giving you more leverage in stakeholder conversations. Does investing in a new control today save on future scalability upgrades tomorrow? Does the tool position your business ahead of evolving compliance regulations that will become increasingly relevant?
While it's often simple to frame security tools as a necessity, winning over your board requires framing it as a value-add for the business.
Leverage risk assessments and metrics
Like any pitch, first-party data can be your strongest ally when it comes to convincing skeptical board members. Using risk assessments or quantifiable metrics from your team can provide a clear, data-driven argument for a new security control proposal.
Understanding your current threat exposure is not only an effective way to prioritize your teams, but to prioritize your investments. Illustrating these gaps for the board can support the claims you're making for better business outcomes and risk mitigation.
Using metrics that matter
The metrics you're using should correlate with the claims you're making in support of the tool. Does a new testing tool support operational efficiency because it has wider technique coverage or because it generated fewer false positives? If you're comparing how a tool improves your defenses, you should be able to show how your threat exposure changes with the addition of a new tool.
Choose metrics that your board is familiar with. The time you're asking for a new security tool should not be the first time your board hears about your MTTR. Tooling discussions can create more questions about your team's efficacy than the proposed investment. If you're saying your EDR proof of concept decreased your false positive rate, clarify that your team invested in this effort before this new tool enhanced its impact.
Use real-world case studies
While data resonates, stories stick. As you paint a picture of the business outcomes of both action and inaction, real-world scenarios can provide a major boost. At Prelude, we know that when a breach makes the news, a competitor's board will often ask the CISO "are we protected?"
The reverse is also true. Security teams can point to incidents where similar organizations that didn't invest in the proposed tool suffered reputational or financial consequences. For instance, some could cite the PowerSchools incident, where thousands of credentials were compromised, to justify a privilege access management tool or expansion of existing MFA tools.
Success stories can be just as effective as cautionary tales. The best security leaders lean on peers in their industry or circles not only to recommend tools and processes, but to justify those investments to their board members. Showcasing how a proposed tool reduced risk or bolstered business outcomes at a comparative organization makes everything more tangible to your stakeholders.
Know the plan to maximize investments
In a perfect world, we wouldn't worry about the ROI of security investments. They would simply work and we would all feel safer. But like any segment of the business, security leaders must justify and maximize their investments over time.
A smart board member will ask how new tools will be managed, how they'll be rolled out, and how they will be evaluated from a success perspective. Be ready to answer those questions during your proposal, easing any concerns about new investments and demonstrating their potential impact.
Articulate a detailed plan covering initial purchasing and tool implementation, along with ongoing maintenance and evaluation strategies. This will help ensure your investments are used to their fullest potential. It will also help you make informed decisions about whether to renew or upgrade existing tools based on their efficacy.
An entire category of tools exists to enable this, including some of the work we're doing at Prelude to help teams maximize and justify their security investments. The goal is to understand how these tools are deployed and performing on a regular basis so teams and stakeholders can quickly visualize the value of their investments.
Making the case for security tools as a business enabler
Securing your board's buy-in hinges on reframing security investments as business-critical components that still deliver measurable value. By focusing on what matters to your organization, such as risk, revenue, reputation, compliance, you can transform how business stakeholders perceived your investments in security controls.
Remember that your ultimate goal isn't just to secure a budget; it's to champion resilience, protect brand trust, and empower sustainable business growth. Asking for money is a quick way to be pushed out of the room, but articulating how that money enables those outcomes is your path to a signed contract.
Contributed by Prelude.