Say goodbye to "unclear accounts"—the "ROI pain" of Party A's security is finally cured!

On the client side, how to measure the return on cybersecurity investment is often an "uncalculable account." We all deeply understand the importance of security, but when it comes to budget approval and resource acquisition, how to clearly and powerfully demonstrate the value of security work to superiors and business departments is always a significant challenge.
This article does not discuss those ROI models that are too idealized but difficult to implement. Instead, it focuses on how the client's security department can demonstrate value more pragmatically and strive for understanding and support under realistic conditions of limited resources, imperfect data, and tight time frames.
▌The "ROI Pain" of Client Security: The Huge Gap Between Ideal and Reality
We all know that the greatest value of security is "no incidents." But "no incidents" is too difficult to quantify. The leader asks you: "We invested so much money in security this year, what return did it bring me?" You say: "Leader, we successfully blocked XX attacks and avoided YY million in losses." The leader might be thinking: "How do you know there would definitely be a loss of YY million? Is that alarmist?"

• "Credit goes to the leaders, the blame goes to security": When the business makes money, it's because the business is awesome; when a security incident occurs, the security department takes the blame.

• Missing and inaccurate data: Want to calculate ALE? Who determines the asset value? The business department can't explain it clearly, and the finance department doesn't cooperate. The probability of a threat occurring? Is it just a wild guess?

• Universal perception of a "security tax": In many cases, security investment is viewed as a "tax" that must be paid rather than an investment that drives the business.

• Exhausted and having no time to "settle accounts": Daily operations, emergency response, and compliance audits have already exhausted the security team's energy, so where is the time to build complex ROI models?

Therefore, security leaders need to recognize a reality. In many cases, pursuing an accounting-perfect, cybersecurity ROI accurate to two decimal places is unrealistic and unnecessary. Our goal should be to "tell a compelling value story" to different audiences through a more pragmatic approach.

▌Change the way you look at "return": From "calculating money" to "looking at efficiency, reducing risk, and promoting business" Since it is so difficult to directly calculate "how much money was made" or "how much money was saved," we might as well change our perspective and start from the following aspects that are easier to perceive and measure: 1. Measurable "efficiency improvement" and "cost savings" (visible savings) 【Security Operations Efficiency】 Case 1 Automation efficiency improvement: Before introducing the SOAR platform, it took the security team an average of 30 minutes to handle a single phishing email incident; after introduction, 80% of phishing email analysis and disposal were automated, and the average processing time dropped to 5 minutes.
Processing 1,000 phishing emails per month saves (30-5) * 1,000 * 80% = 20,000 minutes ≈ 333 hours of labor. Based on the average hourly wage, this is a real cost saving, or it allows the team to do more valuable things.
Case 2 Reduction in false positives: After replacing with a new threat intelligence source or optimizing SIEM rules, the false positive rate for high-risk alerts dropped from 60% to 20%. Analysts no longer waste a lot of time on invalid alerts and can focus more on real threats. 【IT Operations Synergy】 Case 3 Faster patch management: By connecting the vulnerability management platform with IT operations' CMDB, the time from vulnerability discovery to notifying the responsible person for remediation was shortened from an average of 2 days to 2 hours. This shortens the risk exposure window and also reduces the labor cost for the IT department to track vulnerability information.

2. Perceptible "risk reduction" and "problem resolution" (tangible security) 【Focus on key risks, let data speak】 Case 4 Ransomware protection: In response to the high incidence of ransomware, we made a special investment in XX (such as stronger EDR, micro-segmentation, backup and disaster recovery). Instead of empty talk about how much loss was avoided, show the data: In the past year, similar enterprises in the industry had an average of X ransomware incidents, while we had 0; or, through security validation, prove that our detection/blocking coverage for the TTPs of mainstream ransomware families increased from Y% to Z%. Leaders may not understand TTPs, but they can understand "coverage improvement." Case 5 Data leakage prevention: After implementing DLP, count the number of times sensitive data leakage attempts were blocked, or prove through red team exercises that the difficulty of data leakage has significantly increased. 【Solve "long-standing and difficult" problems】 Case 6 Frequent account theft: After implementing MFA, the number of account theft appeal incidents dropped by 90%. This is a change that both business departments and employees can directly feel. 3. Provable "compliance achievement" and "worry-free auditing" (surmountable hurdles) Case 7 Classified protection/GDPR compliance: Invested in purchasing a log audit system and bastion host, successfully passed the classified protection evaluation/GDPR audit, and avoided potential fines or business restrictions of XX million. This is the most direct "avoidance of loss," and there are clear external pressures and standards. 4. Supportable "business enablement" and "innovation assurance" (helpful assistance) Case 8 New business launch: A new business needs to quickly migrate to the cloud and provide services to the public. The security department intervened in advance and provided XX security solutions (such as cloud WAF, container security) to ensure that the business went online safely and on time. Security is no longer a bottleneck for business, but a partner in business development. You can try to communicate with the business department to roughly estimate the potential revenue brought by the early launch of the new business, where security contributed the value of "safeguarding." Case 9 Remote work assurance: Quickly deployed secure VPN and zero-trust access solutions during the pandemic, ensuring the efficiency and security of all employees working remotely. Value demonstration: Business continuity was guaranteed.

▌How does Pyxsoft help clients "see" value in a "down-to-earth" way? As a technologically leading security validation platform in China, the value provided by Pyxsoft is not to let you calculate that ethereal ROI figure, but to practically help you: 1. Turn "vague sense of security" into "specific defense data" Questions you care about: "I bought so many security devices, are they really working? Are they configured correctly? Can they withstand real hacker attacks?" How we do it: Pyxsoft's security metrics validation platform will continuously simulate real attack methods (yes, those TTPs that hackers are actually using) and apply them to your production environment (safely and controllably, of course). You can intuitively see which attacks were blocked by which device, and which attacks passed through unimpeded.

• Identify "sleeping" investments: Discover those security devices that were bought but not configured properly, or became ineffective due to outdated rules. This avoids "wasting money."

• Optimize existing configurations: Based on the validation results, precisely adjust firewall policies and EDR rules to maximize the effectiveness of existing investments.

• Provide ammunition for budget requests: When you can present specific data showing "we only have 30% coverage for XX mainstream attack paths, and need to reinforce XX link," it is much more powerful than simply shouting "we need more budget."

2. Make the prioritization of "massive vulnerabilities" more "tailored to you" Questions you care about: "With so many vulnerabilities scoring CVSS 9.8, which one should we fix first? Which one poses the greatest threat to our business?" How we do it: This is precisely where the value of our product's core concept and risk assessment methodology lies. It doesn't just look at common metrics like CVSS, EPSS, and KEV. More importantly, it combines whether "this vulnerability can actually be exploited in your environment (i.e., enterprise-specific exploitability)" validated through our platform, and "how important the asset where this vulnerability resides is to your business (asset criticality)."

• Focus on real risks: A vulnerability with a CVSS score of 7, if it can easily bypass your layers of defense and affect core business systems, its actual risk may far exceed a vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9 that is perfectly blocked by a WAF. Our methodology is to help you find the former.

• Save remediation resources: The security team and application development team can focus their energy on handling those vulnerabilities assessed as high actual risk based on this concept, instead of being led by the nose by common scores and wasting time on vulnerabilities with high theoretical risk but low actual threat.

• Explain to leaders "why fix this first": When leaders ask why a vulnerability that doesn't seem so "severe" is prioritized for remediation, you can clearly explain: "Leader, although this vulnerability has a low common score, our validation platform proved that hackers can exploit it to directly reach our order system, so we must handle it first."

3. Evidence of turning "security work" from a "cost center" to an "efficiency center" Questions you care about: "The security team is busy running around every day, how can we prove that our work is highly effective?" How we do it: Continuous security validation can clearly show how much your defense capability against specific attacks has improved after you perform security hardening or invest in new security products (for example, the detection rate for a certain type of ransomware increased from 40% to 90%). By quickly validating the actual exploitability of newly discovered vulnerabilities in your environment, it helps you make response decisions faster.

• Performance visualization: These are direct reflections of the security team's achievements and can serve as strong evidence for internal performance evaluation and reporting upward.

• Improve incident response efficiency: Facing 0-day or urgent vulnerability advisories, the security validation platform can quickly assess their actual threat in your own environment, avoiding blindly following trends to apply patches or over-responding.

▌Some pragmatic thinking and direction of practice For client security work, the following directions may be worth our common consideration and attempts: 1. Start small and accumulate value. You don't need to pursue building a comprehensive and large-scale ROI model in one step; you can start by solving the most prominent pain points at present and gradually demonstrate the effectiveness of security work. 2. Focus on the "translation" and "contextualization" of communication. When communicating with decision-makers or business departments without a technical background, try to translate technical language into business impact, and explain with specific scenarios and cases to make the significance and value of security work easier to understand. 3. Consciously accumulate "value materials." In daily work, successful emergency responses, potential losses or business interruptions avoided through security measures (even on a small scale), and major hidden dangers discovered by security validation can all be recorded as materials. These will serve as strong evidence when presenting value and striving for resources in the future. 4. Establish partnerships with business departments. Proactively understand business needs and pain points, and think about how security can better support and empower business development, rather than just playing the role of a "goalkeeper" or "restrictor." Solving security issues that business departments care about often wins more understanding and support. 5. Actively explore and apply new technologies and methods. For example, technical means such as security validation can concretize vague security states, providing objective data support for risk assessment, decision support, and effectiveness demonstration, helping us more clearly show the professionalism and effectiveness of security work.

On the client side, the measurement of return on security investment is more about "value perception" and "risk narrative" rather than a cold financial figure. We must learn to use language that leaders and business departments can understand, combined with specific scenarios and data (even trend data and comparison data), to prove the value of security work. Pyxsoft's security metrics validation platform and the risk assessment methodology it advocates that fits the actual situation of enterprises are precisely the powerful tools to help you collect these "value evidences" and tell this "risk story" well. I hope these insights can bring some inspiration to colleagues struggling on the front line of client security. The road to security is long and difficult; let's encourage each other!