As our digital age continues to expand and become ubiquitous across every piece of our life, it has become inevitable that cyberattacks continue to expand. Attackers continued to target healthcare, retail, casinos and other verticals with ransomware, bots, supply chain attacks, and other forms of attack, while geopolitical tensions continued to heighten cyber risk around the world, most recently with the recent outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
On the front lines of these continued challenges are Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and their teams, who are charged with defending the organization from attack. This is an essential job, one that is not only expanding in responsibility as threats rise but also scope, as threats expand across both digital and physical systems. For a sense of scale of the challenge at hand, there are an estimated 32,000 CISOs globally fighting against cyberattacks that occur on average every 39 seconds.
The good news? Budgets are going up, according to a new NightDragon Special Report. In an anonymous survey, NightDragon Advisors shared their spending patterns for 2023 and if they expect budgets to increase in 2024. Additionally, Advisors provided insights into what trends they are watching and what technology categories they expect to grow in the year to come.
NightDragon’s Advisor Council includes a growing group of nearly 100 renowned industry leaders and advisors with expertise in product, go-to-market, government, executive management and marketing. It also includes highly regarded Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) who are at the cutting edge of their fields and can provide a buyer’s perspective on the market.
Read our full Special Report to dig into additional insights into CISO cyber spending trends, as well as what technologies and risk areas they are watching in 2024. Additionally, the full report features additional deep dives into how these dynamics played out in government, go-to-market trends for vendors and international markets like Israel.
Findings from the survey include:
- Nearly 80% of CISOs said their budgets increased or significantly increased from 2022 to 2023, up from 66% last year.
- Budgets in 2023 went to categories such as ransomware resiliency, managed detection and response, identify, cloud security, operational technology security, endpoint security, artificial intelligence, new team members and more.
- The vast majority of CISOs said they expect their budgets to increase again in 2024, with 80% reporting growing budgets, up from 67% last year.
It is encouraging to see our world’s cyber leaders increasing their defenses of our most essential assets and fighting back against bad actors wishing to do harm. This trend also shows the continued importance of cyber budgets as part of the overall business. While other budgets may be feeling the long tail of the economic downturn we’ve experienced in the last few years, cyber budgets appear to be one area that remains resilient.
Download the full report here:
