While IT budgets are increasing globally across industries, getting your IT budget approved is a major undertaking if you’re looking to get an increase. Which is likely int he current climate to implement new technologies and solutions.  

Getting approval for new tech is the hardest part because of the common cost-sensitivity of the board or decision-makers. Why should they pay a high cost without seeing actual figures on what they’ll get in return or properly see the benefit technology brings? 

Presenting actual numbers will help with approval, but only if you can present the cost of your IT budget against the cost of not eliminating existing risk factors. 

You must have a way to quantify risks in order to present their impact on the company, and here’s how you can do this: 

Do Your Research 

Understanding the risks that could affect the company – risks that the IT department could eliminate or mitigate – will help you determine the magnitude of damages, losses or incurred costs to the company. 

You must determine what events would trigger the highest damages to the company. For example, if you deal with lots of sensitive data but don’t have encryption set up well, your highest risk would probably be a data breach or leak. For starters, you should rank the list of risks on how likely they are to happen considering your current solutions for each.   

Determine the Financial Impact of the Risk 

Next, you want to see how heavily these risks would affect the bottom line. Take a look at the overall industry data on how much the possible risks cost on average. This will give you a good ballpark figure to work with. 

Then, take a look at what events have happened in the company’s past that had a negative impact on the bottom line to draw information on how much they could cost if they happened again. 

Now, you can rank the risks based on their financial impact too. This will help you compare their costs versus your proposed budget costs.  

Use Tools to Present Real-Time Impact

You don’t have to stick to spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations to present all possible risks and their costs for the company (it’s likely to take a while and be less accurate.) While they can help, they have a big issue: they are static and present scenarios that you thought could happen. 

How would you deal with the board members asking about a scenario you didn’t think of? Or what happens when the environment changes? 

You have to start over. 

Save yourself time and energy using a tool like Boardish. You can input the information and easily quantify your risks and solutions to present to the board. And run scenarios quickly and effectively. 

 

Now your organization has become proactive rather than reactive when it comes to threats. 

 Instead of guessing and working with ballpark figures, you could show them the real impact on revenue, loss of employees, reputation, and other segments.  

Such tools will help you drive your point across in a way the board will understand – how the risks will affect the company’s future and how far back it could set them. You’ll also be able to see how much each solution mitigates the threat in the cloud or on-prem! Giving a total view of impact on your orgnaization. 

Overall, Boardish is the quickest way to quantify IT and cyber risks, particularly when you’re trying to submit and IT budget proposal. See the boardish demo below: