As we approach the end of the year, many security teams are already planning for 2025. But of course, determining which strategic investments to make for the year ahead within confined budgets can be challenging when conflicting opinions arise.
Many security professionals will already be convinced that advancing their team’s use of intelligent automation must be a key component in next year’s budget. And this blog makes a case to win around those on the fence.
The big three
There are myriad reasons for all organisations to scale up their use of intelligent security automation. We’ve covered many in our blog posts over the past year. But when it comes to budget-level discussions, these three arguments can be particularly effective:
- Optimising resources The Chartered Institute of Information Security’s (CIISec) recent State of the Security Profession Report found that 72% of cybersecurity professionals feel “people” are the greatest operational challenge in the profession. Intelligent automation addresses this commonly felt concern by alleviating professionals of repetitive security processes, like patch compliance and password auditing. As a result, skilled team members can be reallocated to more complex, value-creating work
- Scaling with attack surfaces: Investment in new technology is an important way for organisations to maintain their competitive edge but often involves a trade-off which sees attack surfaces expand. Security budgets need to be weighted to address this. Automating the scanning of all IT assets and feeding this process into real-time dashboards helps security teams keep on top of attack surfaces despite their expansion. Investing in intelligent automation allows this to happen
- Replicating capabilities to cut costs: Intelligent automation can be harnessed to replicate functions of staple security products at a fraction of the cost. To take one example, we’ve previously explained how automation workflows can integrate with a data lake to carry out SIEM-like capabilities. This presents a massive potential cost saving, in the context of the wider security stack, that can’t be discounted. It’s also a fantastic way to extract more value from next year’s budget without a significant increase in spend that won’t be possible for many
All these arguments underline why effective evaluation of intelligent automation in a budget-setting conversation looks beyond basic cost/benefit thinking. Investing in intelligent automation helps organisations respond to pressing concerns like expanding attack surfaces and skills gaps. And in doing so, organisations can make next year’s budget stretch further – especially where intelligent automation is used to minimise costs of the overall security stack.
Selecting the right partner
If your security team is set on spending more on intelligent security automation in the next financial year, you should be considering A-Ops as your platform. To see it for yourself and connect to a member of our team reach out to set up a demo.
