A 176% return on investment, $3.9 million in net present value, and payback in under six months. Those are the returns Forrester Consulting modeled for the SecurityScorecard platform in a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, commissioned by SecurityScorecard and published in May 2024. They’re expressed in exactly the terms your CFO uses to judge any investment. This post shows you how to read those numbers the way finance will, and how to build the same case for cybersecurity ROI from your own data.
That translation matters because security leaders and CFOs often look at the same cybersecurity investment and see different things. The information security team sees risk scores, closed findings, and monitored vendors. The CFO sees a cost line and wants to know what it returns. That gap is why so many cybersecurity ROI conversations stall before they start.
Why cybersecurity ROI is hard to explain
Most security measures are invisible when they work. A cyber attack that gets stopped or a data breach that never happens doesn’t show up on the income statement, and neither does the downtime you avoided. That makes the return on investment for security harder to see than for, say, a new sales tool.
The usual metrics don’t help either. Security teams track ratings, security incidents, and time to remediate. Those are useful operating measures, but none of them is a financial metric. A CFO weighing one initiative against another wants net present value, payback period, and cost avoidance, plus a sense of how confident the estimate is.
And the stakes keep rising. Our Global Third-Party Breach Report found that 35.5% of breaches originated from third parties, making vendors one of the weakest links in data security. Cyber threats that come through vendors are now a board-level concern, which means every security budget gets more scrutiny, not less.
What the Forrester study measured
Forrester interviewed four organizations that use SecurityScorecard and combined their experiences into a single composite organization. It then modeled three years of costs and benefits for that composite, adjusted the estimates for risk, and discounted them to present value. That’s the same discipline a finance team applies to any capital decision, and it’s why the results, summarized in our announcement of the findings, translate so cleanly into finance language.
Reading the headline numbers like a CFO
Four figures carry most of the weight in a finance conversation.
- Return on investment of 176% over three years. ROI compares net benefit with cost. The composite organization’s net benefit of $3.9 million against $2.2 million in costs works out to roughly 176%, meaning each dollar invested returned about $1.76.
- Net present value of $3.9 million. This is the present value of benefits (6.0million)minusthepresentvalueofcosts(2.2 million). A positive NPV means the investment creates value after accounting for the time value of money.
- Payback period of under six months. This is how long it took for cumulative benefits to cover costs. It’s a separate number from ROI, which is measured over the full three years.
- Benefit-to-cost ratio of about 2.7 to 1. This isn’t a headline figure in the study, but it falls straight out of it: $6.0 million in benefits divided by $2.2 million in costs.
Keep ROI and payback apart when you present. They’re easy to blend into a single claim, and a finance audience will notice. Quoting them separately also strengthens the case. A fast payback shows low near-term risk, while the three-year ROI shows how much value builds over time.
Where the $6 million comes from
The total benefit breaks into three lines, and the mix matters more than the total. By far the biggest is avoiding headcount. The composite organization avoided more than $3.8 million in security engineering hiring costs over three years, accounting for about 63% of the total benefit. One interviewed customer put it plainly: without the platform, it would need 10 additional security engineering FTEs to manage existing key vendors and onboard new ones.
The second line is how the platform helps reduce risk. Forrester found a 75% reduction in the risk of breaches from external third-party attacks, valued at a risk-adjusted $1.7 million over three years, or about 28% of the total.
The third is productivity. Onboarding new key vendors became 75% faster, saving about 15 hours per vendor and resulting in a $503,000 efficiency gain, roughly 8% of the total.
That mix should shape how you pitch. More than 70% of the modeled value comes from labor and productivity, costs your CFO already budgets for and can check against a hiring plan. Breach avoidance, the number security teams usually lead with, accounts for a smaller share and is more heavily discounted. Lead with the avoided hires, and present breach risk mitigation as upside rather than the core of the case.
How to measure cybersecurity ROI in your own organization
A composite organization is a starting point, not a forecast. To quantify ROI for your own security investments, build the same three lines from your own data.
- Labor. Track the hours your team spends on vendor monitoring, assessments, and follow-up today, and the headcount you’d need to cover planned vendor growth.
- Onboarding speed. Measure how long it takes to clear a new key vendor, and what each week of delay costs the business units waiting on it.
- Breach exposure. Estimate what a third-party breach would cost in response, downtime, and lost productivity, then apply a conservative probability.
- Security posture trend. Record your own rating and your vendors’ ratings over time, so improvements in managing cyber risks have a baseline.
Our MAX ROI calculator can help you model the managed service side, and the TEI infographic summarizes the study’s findings. For a broader look at the value drivers, see our guide to calculating the ROI of security ratings.
What’s changed since the study
The TEI reflects the SecurityScorecard platform as it stood in May 2024, before the launch of TITAN AI. Since then, AI agents built into the platform have taken on much of the manual work the study priced in, from diagnosing score drops to tracing fourth-party exposure and chasing remediation. That’s the same work behind the avoided hires and productivity gains that drove most of the original return. Our look at vendor risk management automation walks through how those agents work.
Taking the case to your CFO
Treat the cybersecurity investment like any other organizational initiative. Name the stakeholders it serves, from procurement and IT to the board, and tie each benefit to a number they already track. Show the risks you’ll mitigate, but lead with the costs you’ll avoid, and if budget is tight, prioritize the benefit line with the clearest evidence in your own data. A cybersecurity strategy framed around business resilience and predictable spend lands better with finance than one built on fear of the next attack.
For more on framing the conversation, see how to justify your cybersecurity budget and how to communicate third-party risk to the board. Or explore the TITAN AI platform to see what’s behind the numbers.
