How to Justify Security Control Investments to Your Board of Directors

Cybersecurity executives and their teams are under constant pressure and scrutiny. As the barrier to entry for attackers gets lower, defenses need to be improved. As businesses get leaner, often 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 going into 2025. That emphasizes that securing a budget for new security headcount or tooling can be a challenge—especially when you need to articulate complex technical needs to board members who typically prioritize business outcomes over IT jargon. 

Security controls are meant to be 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.  In this post, we'll walk through some of the steps you can take to do so when justifying control investments to your board or relevant stakeholders.

Position to the board's 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, the board is 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 answer this by emphasizing the financial and reputational risks of the threats 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

It's important to frame these in the context of the investment itself like how the proposed email security tool meets these standards. Was your current vendor in use at a competitor that suffered a breach? Or does it offer new capabilities to mitigate a known risk in your organization such as high phishing rate.

Find the business outcomes in security investments

Security investments can very quickly be tied up in technical jargon and what it means to a security team. As we've already established, your board is interested in the broader impact. But, that impact doesn't have to be tied specifically to what happens if you don't invest in a new tool. While these highlight why an investment might be necessary, it doesn't always capture why it's valuable. 

How can you verbalize and extend the value of a security control beyond what it does for your defenses? 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, long-term value is essential to characterize to your board and can have a direct tie to the outcomes above. Cost-savings over time makes an upfront investment more palatable. Similarly, security investments should be framed as a resilience tool. The cost made now outweighs the potential compounding risk of inaction.

Similarly, does investing in a new control in the here and now save on future upgrades due to scalability? Does the tool position your business ahead of evolving compliance regulations that will become increasingly relevant? Regardless of the circumstance, however your proposed investment can be framed against near and far needs of the business is that much more leverage in the conversation with your stakeholders.

It can be 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. Leveraging risk assessments or quantifiable metrics from your team can provide a clear, data-driven argument for your proposals of a new security control. 

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

Whatever metrics you're using should directly correlate to 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 demonstrably show how your threat exposure changes with the addition of a new tool.

When leveraging metrics, it's important to utilize those that your board are familiar with. The time you're asking for a new security tool should not be the first time your board hears about your MTTR or comparative metric. Tooling can very quickly become a red herring and elevate more questions about your team's efficacy than the proposed investment. If you're saying the new EDR tool you conducted a proof of concept with decreased your false positive rate, it should be clear that your team invested in this effort before this new tool made a greater 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've often highlighted the  scenario of when a recent breach hits the wire, a competitor's board will often turn to their CISO asking "Are we protected?"

The same should be true in reverse. Security executives and teams justifying new control investments can just as easily frame the cost of not acting on a new tool on recent scenarios where neglecting an investment in the proposed tool (or having an investment in your current tool) had reputational consequences. For instance, similar brands could theoretically point to the PowerSchools incident, where thousands of credentials were compromised, as a justification for privilege access management tool or expansion of existing MFA tools.

Similarly, success stories can be just as effective as the cost of not acting. The best security leaders lean on peers in their industry or circles to not only recommend tools and processes, but also justify those investments to their board members. By being able to showcase how a pursued tool reduced risk or bolstered business outcomes at a comparative brand 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 be there, work, and we would all feel safer. But like any segment of the business, security leaders need to be able to 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. Being able to proactively answer those questions during your proposal is an excellent way to ease any concerns about new investments and demonstrate the potential impact of these tools. 

Articulating  a detailed plan that outlines not just the initial purchasing and implementation of the tool, but also ongoing maintenance and evaluation strategies can go a long way in ensuring your investments are being utilized to their fullest potential. In the future, this 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 and contextualize how those investments are being well spent.

Making the case for security controls 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—risk, revenue, reputation, compliance, you name it—you can transform how the control investment is perceived. 

It's important to 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.