“Budget cuts affect every aspect of security planning, strategy, and operations — all of which are a complex tapestry orchestrated across the business in alignment with the risk committee,” Ford told CSO.
Frozen headcount is more than frustrating for operational security teams — it accelerates alert fatigue, on-call rotations, and burnout. Lost funding for tooling and projects may exacerbate gaps in visibility — restricting logging coverage, monitoring and alerting, or testing and tracking of vulnerabilities in systems and applications.
“Security initiatives losing funding are rarely in the ‘nice to have’ category — they’re almost always tied to addressing risk items and control gaps that have been prioritized by the risk committee,” Ford said. “The risk being treated, and projects being de-funded, will need fresh risk-acceptance, and may require reporting back to the board of director’s risk committee.”
