How CIOs Will Allocate Budgets in 2022 to Confront Complex Cybersecurity Threats

Christian Wiens Director of Marketing

Christian Wiens is Director of Marketing at MixMode. He has 10+ years of experience as a cybersecurity professional. He has his BA from The University of California, Berkeley and resides in Austin, TX.

2021 was a year of shifting expectations and a long list of “new normals.” The IT field was no exception; in fact, professionals charged with budgeting for enterprise IT departments were faced with balancing essential IT functions and unprecedented network security challenges. CIOs needed to make sure employees could stay connected remotely while working to keep cybercriminals out.

As companies shifted IT budgets from security to virtual work-from-home setups to keep operations running, cybercriminals were all too happy to swoop in and take advantage of increased vulnerability related to undersecured enterprise networks. An annual Harvey Nash Group/KPMG survey of CIOs and other IT leaders revealed that companies spent about $15 billion more each week in the early part of 2021 on work-from-home investments, a figure that represents one of the largest upticks in tech investment history, according to Harvey Nash/KPMG.

Of course, work-from-home investments are just a small part of overall IT budgeting. CIOs and IT leaders need to prioritize some investments over others. The Harvey Nash/KPMG survey found that IT leaders rank three investments among their most important in 2021:

● Security and privacy

● Customer experience and engagement

● Infrastructure/cloud

Security ranks highest at a time when four in ten organizations reported a security breach during the pandemic. Adding more complexity to the budgetary challenges already facing CIOs is the fact that Cybersecurity skills remain elusive in the current employment market. 35% of survey respondents ranked Cybersecurity as the most scarce skill.

MixMode Offers Modern, Cost-Effective Enterprise Cybersecurity Solutions.

Going forward, the picture is similar. Industry watchers expect CIOs to primarily invest in a few major categories in 2022, according to a recent InformationWeek article, “Where IT Leaders Are Likely to Spend Budget in 2022:”

Security (especially related to IoT and increasingly complex hybrid cloud/on-prem environments)
Talent development (especially an emphasis on communication and emerging tech skills for remote work)
Data utilization (analytics, AI, and automation) and data integration tools

Each of these areas of focus are critical (and potentially, quite expensive). Because CIOs are often constrained by tight budgets and organizational demands, finding cost-effective solutions is key. MixMode offers several benefits that can help CIOs and other IT leaders reduce overall spend, even while improving enterprise security postures.

MixMode clients enjoy decreased costs for data storage and threat detection. They also save time spent combing through false positive alerts — the platform can reduce false positives by 95%, freeing up security analysts to focus on true threats and other Cybersecurity priorities.

CIOs would be wise to look beyond traditional log-based SIEM approaches in the coming year. MixMode’s logless security analysis approach greatly reduces the amount of required data storage. SIEM vendors gather data, label it (including normalizing data so that it can be used exclusively by specific Cybersecurity vendors), and sort it — a timely, costly process that is often obfuscated at the time of sale. Because MixMode works free from logs, instead building a constantly-evolving baseline of expected network behavior, much of the overhead inherent to SIEM is eliminated from the start.

Learn more about how MixMode can help reduce Cybersecurity spend in 2022 and beyond, and set up a demo today.