Over half of CISOs expect frozen or lower budgets in 2024
A new State of Pentesting report from Pentera shows that 53 percent of organizations surveyed have decreasing or stagnating cybersecurity budgets, requiring CISOs to do more with less.
This compares to last year when 92 percent of organizations surveyed expected to raise their IT security budgets. Only five percent of CISOs this year are projecting their IT security budgets will grow by more than 10 percent compared to 36 percent in 2023.
The survey, of 450 CISOs, CIOs, and IT security leaders at enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees, shows that organizations are continuing to prioritize pentesting as part of their security tool kit, accounting for an average of $164,400 (nearly 13 percent of their total IT security budgets) -- but drivers and uses for pentesting continue to evolve. Traditionally, pentesting originated as a compliance requirement within many industries, however today, pentesting is primarily a security driven practice and communication tool for CISOs. Over 50 percent of CISOs report that they share the results of pentest assessments with their leadership teams as well as their boards of directors, using these reports as a tool to communicate cybersecurity risk both within and outside their organizations.
There is, however, a gap between the rate of change to systems and the rate of testing. 73 percent of organizations say they report changes to their IT environments at least quarterly, however only 40 percent report pentesting at the same frequency.
The rate of alerts is an issue too, over 60 percent of organizations report a weekly minimum of 500 security events for remediation. Becoming 'patch perfect' is an unfeasible, if not impossible, target for organizations. What's more, organizations are even more resource constrained than before. In 2023, only 21 percent of respondents reported a lack of internal resources for remediation as a barrier to pentesting, while this year the number has jumped to 36 percent.
The full report is available from the Pentera site.
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