Excel template: Plan and monitor your security spending

The Ultimate Security Budget Plan & Track template is an Excel spreadsheet that comes pre-packaged with the required formulas to continuously measure, on a monthly basis, the planned and actual security investments, providing immediate visibility into any mismatch between the two. In addition, for each month there is a summary, displaying the percentage of how much of the overall annual budget has been already consumed.

The template divides security spending into three buckets:

• Products – Already deployed as well as planned projects for the coming year.
• Staff – Ongoing retainment of the security team, investments in their professional development, and security training to the organization’s workforce.
• Services – Any type of 3rd party services, from product deployment and management to IR and auditing.

Naturally, there is no one size fits all, and while the template is pre-populated with common products, staff, and services categories with examples it is meant to be used as a starting point from which each CISO can make modifications and adjustments based on their organization’s unique needs.