SPECIAL REPORT: CYBER LEADERS ON 2023 TRENDS AND 2024 OUTLOOK

Top cybersecurity leaders in the NightDragon Advisor Council provide perspective on 2023 trends and 2024 spending outlook

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 NightDragon survey of CISOs from leading global organizations. Nearly 80% of CISOs said their budgets increased or significantly increased from 2022 to 2023, up from 66% last year. These budgets 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.

80%
CISOs say they expect cyber
budgets to increase in 2024

What’s 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. While the threat continues to rise in all areas and damages from cyberattacks expected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, 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.

It’s clear that our landscape will continue to evolve, a dynamic that’s critical as we face new upcoming threats around elections, bots, artificial intelligence, ransomware and more. In short: a world of heightened cyber risk appears to be our new permanent reality. In response, CISOs said they are looking at technologies like AI (for defense) and other emerging technology. trends that were not as clear priorities in previous years. What’s more, we continue to see focus on new categories, such as passwordless, new data security areas, cloud security and more. As an investor, that gives me great optimism, but also as a long-term cybersecurity industry professional, it gives me hope for a bright and secure future together as an industry.

Read on in this report for further insights from some of the world’s most important CISOs, including where they are investing, what technologies excite them in today’s market, and what risk areas they view as most significant in the coming year.

Read the full report, here.

Dave DeWalt
Founder and CEO of NightDragon
Former CEO of FireEye, McAfee and Documentum
Board Director at Delta Airlines, Five9 and other
organizations