Guests
TL;DR: Budget season is upon us, and Rafal & James sit down with Ken Foster and Jack Korzeniowski to get some insights into how CISOs deal with budgets, separate truth from fiction, and get down into the dirty secrets.
Description
Budget season can feel like a slow-motion incident response: everyone has competing priorities, nobody wants surprise spend, and security still has to defend the enterprise. We sit down with experienced security leaders to talk candidly about how cybersecurity budgeting really works when you’re fighting for headcount, renewals, and new controls while leadership asks for ROI and says, “Nothing’s happened for three years, so why are we spending so much?” We share what actually lands in a budget deck that survives scrutiny and what gets cut even when it is clearly needed.
From there, we get practical about the messy realities that break a clean plan. Audit findings can free up money faster than any risk narrative, but relying on that is a terrible strategy, so we discuss how to model “what happens if we don’t renew” and how to translate risk tolerance into finance language. We also dig into surprise drivers like mergers and acquisitions, sudden asset growth, and cross-team dependencies, where security buys the tool, but IT and app teams handle deployment and ongoing operational workload. If you don’t align early, you don’t just miss timelines; you damage trust across the organization.
Then we tackle the newest budget collision: AI. Tokenomics, unpredictable utility bills, rising infrastructure costs, shadow AI, and rapidly forming “AI debt” can turn a reasonable forecast into a painful true-up. We outline ways to cap spend, phase rollouts, and keep governance tight without killing innovation. Finally, we give vendors and consultants a clear playbook for being better partners: multi-year price predictability, phased licensing, honest roadmap commitments, no surprise true-ups, and real total cost of ownership and ROI modeling that helps us sell the work internally.
If you found this useful, subscribe, share it with a security leader heading into budget season, and leave a review with the one budget surprise you never want to relive.
Youtube Video: https://youtube.com/live/al7gQvb7C_Q
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