CISO Dialogue: How to Optimize Your Security Budget

It's unavoidable: New projects require budgets. To justify the expense, any budget spent on new technology needs to be designed to lower the risk profile. Or the problem might be an inefficiency in the program that can be better addressed with new technology. So, how can CISOs understand how best to optimize their limited pool of security budget? I sat down with Brett Wahlin, the CISO of Amazon Prime Video, to discuss the topic.

"There are many different approaches to managing a security budget, and CISOs organize and prioritize uniquely based on the company, industry, and threats. Three consistent areas of spending are identity and access management (IAM), global risk and compliance (GRC), and security operations," Wahlin told me, noting:

Budget allocation should shift to address these problems. Wahlin's trick to shift budgets to new priorities? Find money in existing budgets through optimization — such as replacing humans with software, moving operating expenditures to capital expenditures. "If I can automate an activity with software and repurpose human resources, that's a powerful money-saving step," he said.   

ROI? No So Fast
ROI is a legitimate business concern, but Wahlin generally discourages the idea of ROI as a gauge of cybersecurity success. Referencing ROSI, return on security investment, Wahlin said ROI alone is a vendor-driven metric. "It makes the assumption that you can place a value on an asset that is out of your control and that you can measure a loss and a probability of occurrence."

Still, CISOs want to save wherever they can. Security operations and monitoring is an opportunity for replacing head count with software, which Wahlin has done. "If you automate your Tier 1 security analysts, you can free up head count and save budget," he said. "Plus, the analysts who remain will have a much better job experience. They won't be staring at events on a screen but doing more meaningful, satisfying work."

SOAR and SIEM: Worth It?
Some organizations wonder if security orchestration and response (SOAR) tools are worth the engineering upkeep. "I think it's promising. When I look at getting efficiencies out of a SOC, I have to look at events, correlate, and then determine what needs to be done," Wahlin said. "Your SOAR is only as fast as the individual making a decision. Automate the decision and the SOAR will operate better." 

Wahlin continued, "As for [security information and event management (SIEM)], I used to feel that it was necessary to build a SOC because teams had to collect alerts from a diverse number of sensors and reduce them to meaningful incidents to investigate. I now find my opinion changing." A next-generation SIEM can take all the alerts from the sensors directly and make decisions on those alerts, and then you don't have to store them in the SIEM.

Top Tips for New CISOs
Wahlin concluded with a breakdown of the most important things he would recommend a new CISO look at, both budgetary and beyond:

CISOs are never going to have all the finances they want. Hard choices need to be made — choices that will determine your entire organization's security posture. Diagnose what needs immediate attention and work from there. Your priorities will help you see where you can save money by making changes in other areas, such as using automation to reduce head count. These best practices will help you build a solid security foundation that optimizes your budget.  

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