How to Quantify Your End of Year IT and Cyber Budget
The end of the year is almost here, and so is the time to submit and get approval for your end of year IT and cyber budgets. But just adding the cost of your IT- and cyber-related expenses is not an accurate representation of the real cost to the business. You also need to take into consideration various risk factors, the means of mitigating them, and the true solution costs, all in the business language (aka money.)
And this is what we mean by quantifying! (and this is why our users get their budgets approved 80% faster!)
Why should you quantify risks and include it in your budget?
By analysing cyber risks you have previously identified and assigning a figure to them, you will make the decision-making process easier. Since risk has an intangible nature, it’s difficult to understand in context of business and financials. By quantifying it, decision-makers will be able to make sense of it and assign appropriate budgets to risk mitigation, without board members having to become technical gurus in the process.
It gives decision-makers the confidence to make decisions quickly, and reduce the time it takes to get approval.
There are several models and approaches you could use to quantify your end of year cyber budget, but most of them calculate probability, which doesn’t really help with quantifying actual costs, only potential costs.
Instead the Boardish methodology makes the entire process simple by transforming IT threats and solutions into financial figures, making decision-making easier and more accurate. (read more on our methodology here: https://www.boardish.io/the-boardish-methodology-budget-approval-framework/
How Boardish works
Boardish enables you to effectively quantify cyber risk and get financial figures simply by inputting the necessary data from your organisation. You can do this in 6 easy steps:
- Input company info
- Input threat info
- Input solution info
- Input threat protection factor
- Input expert cost per solution
- Select regulation impact per threat
When you’re done, the Boardish algorithm will produce all the info you need for your board in the dashboard.
To provide you with accurate results, Boardish uses its unique Threat Protection Factor (TPF) methodology.
The methodology focuses on solution efficiency and translates cyber risk into financial figures, taking into consideration how well a specific solution mitigates a certain threat.
It’s not based on the Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) methodology or probability. The TPF methodology also allows you to enter a team’s expertise and CISO’s experience into the calculation.
You can test Boardish’s efficiency by entering data from an event that has already occurred and compare the result to the real-world one; there is no need for guesswork.
If you didn’t get the same numbers, you can manually adjust the solution efficiency to get them to match, allowing you to make precise end of year budget predictions that match your exact solutions.
Boardish is also fully compatible with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework, giving you threat identification, detection, and quantification all in one package. You will need to cover the risk assessment part with NIST first in order to do the final step of the risk assessment process in Boardish.
Once you’re done, you can communicate with decision-makers through financials and visuals, filtering the information that is important to them.
Why is communicating in financials important?
By the end of the year, decision-makers will need to approve several budgets, not just IT and cyber security. By communicating in financials, you allow the board to prioritise risks on a company level, between different functions, and detect which threats need immediate action.
It also makes IT budget benchmarking easier, so the board can compare your plans against peers of similar industries, as well as other departments. By making your budget easy to understand by the board, it’s more likely that it will get approved.
If you want to try Boardish and see it in action by yourself, you can do that now with a free trial. Just sign up for free.
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