From Cost Center to Capital Strategy

How CISOs Change the Budget Conversation — and Why It’s Long Overdue

Sorry for the delay in the article this week.

For years, cybersecurity leaders have walked into boardrooms with the same uphill battle: justify spend for something that ideally never happens.

No breach. No outage. No headlines.

Success in security is invisible. Growth, on the other hand, is celebrated quarterly.

That asymmetry is why so many CISOs struggle to secure funding — not because the risk isn’t real, but because the narrative hasn’t evolved fast enough to match the business environment.

If the CISO role is going to mature into what it was always meant to be — an enterprise risk leadership function — then the paradigm must shift from control management to capital strategy.

And that shift isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening.

Risk Description vs. Risk Quantification

For decades, security programs relied on qualitative models: heat maps, maturity scores, compliance percentages. They were useful internally. They are insufficient at the board level.