Crayons to Calculators: A New Approach to Cybersecurity Vendor Selection

The cybersecurity market is facing a new reality: budgets are flat or shrinking, while threats continue to grow. CISOs are under pressure to maximize the value of their current tools, justify new initiatives, and compete with AI-focused spending priorities and re-shoring activities—all while stepping into broader leadership roles.

The old ways of evaluating cybersecurity products no longer work. Analyst rankings, vendor-driven fear statistics, buzzword Monopoly, and color-coded dashboards are holding less weight with CFOs and boards. Budget requests must now be backed by clear financial justification and evidence of risk reduction.

That’s why BlueVoyant and Axio have partnered to transform how cybersecurity investments are evaluated. Together, we have developed a model placing cybersecurity spending on the same level as other core business investments—measured in financial ROI and tied directly to your organization’s unique risk profile. To create the model, we mapped most of the NIST CSF 2.0 controls to dozens of Axio cyber event cost model variables considering the impact of each control and the maturity of the firm in deploying that control.

From now on, BlueVoyant customers will gain tailored insights into how each solution in the portfolio reduces or eliminates risk. We express these results in terms of avoided financial losses from successful cyber attacks, with Axio’s transparent methodology making the impact easy to understand, explain, and defend.

This partnership goes beyond helping customers see day-to-day value. We designed it to elevate the entire discipline of cybersecurity by delivering benefits across the organization:

• CISOs gain credibility with CFOs and peers when justifying budgets.
• CFOs get clear visibility into how cybersecurity spending protects the balance sheet.
• Boards see measurable evidence of risk reduction over time.
• Risk managers can strengthen their case to insurers for stable—or even reduced—premiums.

Cybersecurity has evolved dramatically over the last two decades, but the “final mile” of aligning investments with financial outcomes has yet to be fully crossed. BlueVoyant and Axio are proud to lead the way—showing how cybersecurity decisions can, and should, be made from this point forward.

—John Reel and Scott Kannry