Security budgets are up. Way up. 85% of organizations increased security spending this year, and 88% plan to spend even more next year. The average enterprise now invests at least $5 million annually in security tools, staffing, and services. Some spend over $50 million.
Yet here's what should concern boards: 56% of security professionals don't believe their budgets are sufficient to counter the risks they face. Not satisfied—convinced the money isn't enough. And they're not wrong to feel that way.
Half of all CISOs report burnout severe enough to compromise their ability to prevent breaches. Security teams leave 78% of alerts unexamined. Organizations take 252 days on average to address half of discovered vulnerabilities. Record spending while teams drown under unmanageable workloads and vulnerabilities pile up faster than they can be addressed.
The disconnect isn't about insufficient investment. It's about where that investment goes.
The Budget Allocation Mismatch
Security spending remains heavily weighted toward detection—finding vulnerabilities—while resolution capacity stagnates. Look at how security budgets break down:
• 23% to personnel
• 21% to cloud security products
• 16% to managed security services
• 18% to traditional on-premises security tools
• 15% to professional services
Notice what's missing? Dedicated budget for actually fixing the vulnerabilities those tools discover. Organizations buy scanners, not fixers.
The allocation assumes finding vulnerabilities is the hard part. But the bottleneck has shifted. Remediation timelines stretched from 171 days to 252 days in just five years—a 47% increase despite rising investment. Remediation is getting worse while detection budgets grow.
The problem compounds when you examine coverage. 61% of organizations admit they're testing 60% or less of their application portfolio, with 45% still relying on manual processes to add new code to security testing queues. This represents massive "security debt": vulnerabilities that exist but haven't even been discovered yet, let alone fixed.
So organizations spend millions finding problems but lack the capacity to address them. The budget allocation mismatch isn't about total dollars. It's about the ratio between detection capacity and resolution capacity growing increasingly imbalanced.
The "More Scanners" Trap
Because the budget is skewed toward detection, organizations accumulate tools. 58% of organizations now run more than 25 different security tools. Nearly a third operate 50 or more. An unlucky 13% manage over 100.
Each tool added to the stack was supposed to close a gap. And individually, many deliver value. The problem emerges in aggregate. These tools don't just find more vulnerabilities. They generate exponentially more noise.
71% of organizations report that between 21-60% of their security test results are noise: duplicate findings, false positives, conflicting results from different scanners. Research shows false positive rates ranging from 71-88% across common vulnerability scanners.
The volume becomes unmanageable. Black Duck found that 81% of DevSecOps professionals say application security testing slows down development. Security transforms from enabler to bottleneck. Teams learn to route around it. And when 78% of alerts go uninvestigated, the entire early warning system becomes unreliable.
This creates operational drag at scale. 49% of organizations cite complexity and resource sprawl as their primary challenge to effective cloud security. Not budget constraints. Not lack of management support. Complexity from having too many tools.
39% cite the time and effort required to run and manage existing tools as a primary challenge. The tools meant to improve security now consume the bandwidth needed to actually secure systems.
This manifests in fragmented workflows. 65% of CISOs now oversee 20+ security tools. Each tool has its own dashboard, its own API, its own alert format. Security teams context-switch between disconnected systems. Correlation happens manually, if it happens at all.
This explains why more than half of breached organizations had the tools that should have prevented the breach. They detected the vulnerability. They generated the alert. They just couldn't act on it fast enough because it was buried under thousands of alerts that weren't real threats.
Budget → Tools → Noise → Paralysis. Detection capacity has scaled. Resolution capacity hasn't. That's the gap.
The Human Bottleneck
When you dump 100 alerts on a team that can only fix 10, the result isn't just a backlog. It's burnout.
40% of CISOs are actively considering leaving the profession within the next 12 months. Average tenure has dropped to 24 months at many organizations. The industry is cycling through security leaders instead of enabling them to succeed.
The Detection-Resolution Gap isn't just a data line on a chart. It's a person working late. It's a security engineer triaging their 500th alert this week knowing they can only fix five. It's a CISO explaining to the board why spending increased 85% while breach risk stayed flat.
More detection tools generate larger backlogs. Larger backlogs overwhelm remediation capacity. Overwhelmed teams triage reactively instead of strategically. The cycle reinforces itself and breaks the workforce in the process.
31% of organizations now prioritize replacing their current security tools over adding to their existing stack. Only 26% prioritize additions. Security teams increasingly recognize that solving problems created by tools 1-20 by adding tool 21 doesn't work.
But consolidation won't fix the structural imbalance. Fewer, better detection tools still generate backlogs if resolution capacity doesn't scale to match. The current strategy is breaking both the systems and the people running them.
The Shift from Finding to Fixing
Recognition of the detection-resolution gap is driving experimentation with different approaches. 62% of organizations now prioritize increasing automation as their top security improvement for the next 12 months.
Some organizations are implementing reachability analysis to filter findings before remediation workflows. The logic: determine what's actually exploitable in the specific application architecture (considering authentication boundaries, network segmentation, and other controls) before spending time on theoretical vulnerabilities that can't be reached by attackers. Filtering the noise helps. It reduces wasted effort on low-risk findings.
Others are adopting application security posture management (ASPM) platforms to deduplicate and correlate findings across multiple tools. The goal is to impose order on tool sprawl by creating a unified view of risk. Organizing the noise helps. It addresses the correlation problem.
But neither filtering nor organizing actually fixes the code. The bottleneck remains: human remediation capacity can't scale to match detection velocity.
If the constraint is human remediation capacity, the logical solution is automated remediation. Not just automated detection. Not just automated triage. Automated fixing—at the scale and speed that matches how vulnerabilities are discovered.
Some security teams are embedding more deeply with development teams, shifting left to catch issues earlier when they're cheaper to fix. Others are building remediation automation internally. The common thread: trying to work smarter rather than just harder. Trying to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Trying to get more leverage from existing resources instead of just adding more resources.
None of these approaches fundamentally change the budget allocation between detection and resolution. But they suggest growing awareness that throwing more money at detection tools won't fix a structural capacity mismatch.
The Strategic Pivot
The question boards should ask isn't "Are we spending enough on security?" Most organizations are spending plenty. The question is "Are we spending in ways that address the actual bottleneck?"
Consider what 85% budget growth buys when it flows primarily to detection tools:
• More vulnerabilities discovered
• Larger backlogs generated
• More alerts requiring triage
• More tools requiring management
• More complexity inhibiting effectiveness
• More team burnout and turnover
Consider what balanced spending creates:
• Vulnerabilities discovered at sustainable rates
• Backlogs addressed as fast as they grow
• Alerts triaged by exploitability before reaching teams
• Tools consolidated around actionable outcomes
• Complexity reduced through automation
• Teams focused on strategic security improvements
The math changes when you address the constraint. Organizations using AI and automation extensively shortened breach identification and containment times by 80 days and lowered average breach costs by $1.9 million, according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report.
The strategic question isn't about total security spending. It's about whether that spending addresses the system's limiting factor. When detection capacity far exceeds resolution capacity, more detection makes the problem worse, not better.
The organizations figuring this out aren't necessarily spending more. They're spending differently. Consolidating rather than proliferating. Automating remediation rather than just automating detection. Building capacity where the bottleneck exists instead of optimizing parts of the system that already work.
The disconnect between rising budgets and persistent backlogs isn't inevitable. It's the consequence of investment patterns that haven't adapted as the constraint shifted from detection to resolution.
If you audit your security budget next quarter, ask: What is our ratio of dollars spent on finding bugs versus dollars spent on fixing them? The answer will explain why your backlog keeps growing despite record spending.
