It’s 10:47 PM, and I’m halfway through binge-watching the latest must-see series when my phone buzzes. A notification from SecurityScorecard has my attention instantly: one of our critical vendors has just reported a breach. I hit pause, grab my laptop, and dive straight in. As much as I’d love to ignore it for a few hours, cyber risks don’t come with snooze buttons. Before panic sets in, I’m logging into the SecurityScorecard platform.

If you are like many CISOs, you feel pressure to increase the value of your security testing budget. And if you are one of the 53% of enterprises reporting stagnant or decreasing budgets in 2024, you have even more work cut out for you. Increasing testing value requires a re-evaluation of nearly everything. Tackle tool sprawl. Optimize workflows. Reduce false positives. Review cloud spend. All while demonstrating ROI even in the absence of incidents. This post is about ways to reach these goals.

The notification lands in my SecurityScorecard dashboard just as I’m wrapping up a meeting. An employee’s email address has shown up in a password dump on a dark web monitoring feed. Another day, another reminder of why cybersecurity is a full-contact sport.

It’s mid-morning, and I’m making good progress when an email from a department head pops into my inbox. They’re thrilled about a new plugin that promises to streamline workflows for one of our most critical platforms. Naturally, they need me to sign off on the vendor’s security posture before they can move forward. I get it—business efficiency is important, but so is ensuring we don’t invite unnecessary risk into our environment.