The Five Step Plan That Cuts Security Budget Waste
Help Net Security, Friday, July 17th, 2026
Penetrify CTO Viktor Bulanek outlines a five-step framework for aligning security budgets with real attack paths instead of vendor categories.
Security budgets are frequently built around vendor categories, compliance checkboxes, and last year's headlines rather than how attackers actually operate.
The largest sources of waste are overlapping tools that duplicate findings and unused licenses spanning large portions of infrastructure.
Hidden costs accumulate beyond licensing through alert triage hours, alert fatigue, and false confidence in ineffective tooling.
Bulanek proposes a quarterly cycle: map tool overlaps, measure exploitable findings, consolidate redundant tools, redirect savings to continuous validation of real attack paths, and track cost per validated exploitable finding resolved before production.
The core message is that most organizations need better allocation rather than larger budgets.