TBM for Risk, Security, & Compliance
Managing Cybersecurity and Compliance as Strategic, Value-Aligned Investments
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The Opportunity and Challenge
Cybersecurity, compliance, and enterprise risk have become board-level priorities. Organizations must contend with a rapidly evolving threat landscape, intensifying regulatory scrutiny, and rising expectations from customers, partners, and shareholders. Security leaders are being asked to justify spend, quantify impact, and demonstrate measurable value—not just protection.
Yet many risk and compliance functions operate in silos. Security investments are often treated as cost centers, compliance as overhead, and risk as something to report rather than proactively manage. Without a connected view of cost, consumption, and risk, organizations struggle to make informed decisions or prove ROI.
TBM offers a new approach. As a value framework, TBM allows organizations to model and manage cybersecurity and compliance as strategic services. It connects financial transparency, technology cost modeling, and business value alignment—turning reactive efforts into proactive, accountable investments.
TBM Enables Defensible Cost Allocation and Investment Traceability for Risk & Security
As security architectures grow in complexity and compliance requirements become more stringent, CIOs and CISOs are increasingly called upon to justify the full scope of risk-related technology investments—not only to internal finance and business leaders, but also to regulators, auditors, and external stakeholders. Whether adopting Zero Trust architectures, maintaining regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions, or investing in resilience and risk analytics, organizations need a framework that can accurately map spend and value across multiple dimensions.
This is where TBM delivers foundational value. By connecting technology investments to business context and accountability, TBM enables clear modeling of risk mitigation strategies and their costs, aligned to the organizational units, business capabilities, and services they are designed to protect. Defensible showback and chargeback for cyber and risk-related investments becomes possible, providing transparency into:
- Which lines of business or digital services are consuming which security resources
- How shared platforms or controls (e.g., identity, logging, EDR) are allocated and measured
- What portion of risk-management investment is proactive (e.g., architecture) vs. reactive (e.g., incident response)
- How compliance costs are distributed and governed across regulatory obligations
This structured approach allows CISOs to not only report costs, but model the rationale and performance of risk investments, traceable from tech resources to risk domains to business-critical outcomes. For CIOs, this strengthens cross-functional alignment and unlocks more strategic, portfolio-level decision making about where to invest in cyber resilience and where cost efficiencies can be safely realized.
TBM also helps build a closed-loop connection between contractual risk obligations and delivery, tracking against SLAs, response times, compliance milestones, and performance indicators—all while linking those commitments back to specific financial models. With TBM, risk and cybersecurity stop being just technical domains, and instead become measurable, governable investments integrated into enterprise value conversations.
Taxonomy 5.0: Modeling Security and Compliance with Precision
The updated TBM Taxonomy 5.0 enhances how organizations model and allocate cybersecurity and compliance costs. These enhancements bring structure, depth, and extensibility to risk and security modeling:
- New and expanded Tech Towers: Digital Security, Identity & Access, Risk & Compliance, Governance & Assurance
- Cost Pools for internal and external labor, compliance tooling, audits, assessments, and third-party services
- Enhanced support for shared control services across the enterprise (e.g., EDR, logging, zero trust infrastructure)
- Enablement of scenario modeling for regulatory impact, shared risk domains, or security maturity programs
Taxonomy 5.0 supports modeling not only for point solutions but for end-to-end service views—aligning costs with the capabilities they protect and the business units they serve. This is foundational for integrated planning, chargeback, and strategic justification.
Learn more about how the TBM Taxonomy v5.0 supports security and compliance use cases by downloading the Taxonomy 5.0 Whitepaper.
Integrating with FAIR: Quantifying Cyber Risk and ROI
The FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) framework enables organizations to quantify cyber risk in financial terms. When paired with TBM, it forms a powerful capability for translating risk, cost, and control effectiveness into business outcomes.
FAIR enables:
- Calculation of Annualized Loss Exposure (ALE) across defined risk scenarios
- Quantification of risk reduction from specific control investments
- Prioritization of mitigation strategies based on cost-benefit analysis
TBM complements FAIR by modeling the total cost of controls, services, and platforms across shared infrastructure. With a shared taxonomy (e.g., Solutions, Tech Towers, Business Capabilities), organizations can:
- Map controls and risks to actual cost and consumption
- Justify control spending using Return on Security Investment (ROSI) and Net Present Value (PV)
- Drive executive conversations with a unified view of cost, consumption, and risk
Together, FAIR and TBM enable a risk-informed, data-driven approach to cybersecurity planning, governance, and investment prioritization.
Read A Quantitative Approach to Maximizing Cybersecurity ROI: The Strategic Intersection of FAIR and Technology Business Management to learn how integrating FAIR and TBM enables leaders to quantify risk, maximize ROI, and demonstrate measurable business value.
Mapping to NIST CSF v2: Operationalizing Cyber Governance
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) v2 is a cornerstone for organizing cybersecurity activities across five functional domains: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. TBM Taxonomy 5.0 maps directly to these domains, providing a structured way to:
- Model and allocate spend across CSF functions
- Analyze the cost and effectiveness of current-state controls
- Identify investment gaps aligned to CSF Implementation Tiers
- Forecast future investment needs for maturity improvements
For example:
- Identify: Costs tied to asset management, risk assessment, governance platforms
- Protect: IAM tools, employee training, data security investments
- Detect: SIEM, monitoring platforms, threat intel
- Respond: IR tooling, playbooks, incident communication
- Recover: Backup, continuity, lessons-learned initiatives
With this mapping, security and finance teams can align NIST maturity targets with actual spending and planning cycles—ensuring the CSF isn’t just a framework for audit readiness, but a driver of value-aligned investment.
Read Combining TBM and NIST Cybersecurity to Profile Risk and Justify Investment to learn how integrating TBM with the NIST CSF transforms cybersecurity into a measurable, value-aligned investment portfolio.
Supporting Broader Standards: ISO 27001, CMMC, COBIT, and More
Beyond FAIR and NIST, TBM provides a flexible foundation to support modeling and integration with other critical frameworks:
- ISO/IEC 27001: Map security controls to Tech Towers and Cost Pools to support certification, identify high-cost compliance areas, and optimize audit readiness
- CMMC & FedRAMP: Track readiness investments and allocate shared compliance costs across business units
- COBIT: Align technology and risk governance processes with financial planning and performance management
- HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, GDPR: Model control and compliance costs at the solution level and forecast future regulatory impact
TBM acts as the operational and financial modeling layer that links all these standards into one coherent view—making it easier to plan, optimize, and report across compliance domains.
Core TBM Use Cases for Risk, Security & Compliance
Risk and cybersecurity leaders face the challenge of explaining complex, distributed, and often rapidly changing costs in terms that business executives can understand and act on. Security spending is spread across tools, vendors, and teams; compliance is seen as overhead rather than structured work; and investment decisions are often reactive rather than risk-informed. TBM provides the framework to change this dynamic. By applying TBM disciplines to risk, security, and compliance, organizations can unify fragmented costs, tie spending to measurable business outcomes, and create transparency that builds trust with executives and regulators alike.
1. Cybersecurity TCO and Service Modeling
Security costs are often fragmented across platforms, licenses, vendors, and teams. TBM helps unify these into a complete view of service cost:
- Define services like Access Management, Endpoint Protection, or Threat Intelligence as TBM Solutions
- Map Tech Towers and Cost Pools to reflect total cost (labor, software, cloud, support)
- Attribute service costs to consuming business units or portfolios
- Enable benchmarking, showback, and optimization efforts
TBM makes the cost of security visible, traceable, and justifiable.
2. Risk-Informed Investment Planning (FAIR + TBM)
By integrating FAIR’s quantitative risk modeling with TBM cost models:
- Compare risk reduction per dollar spent across initiatives
- Prioritize investments by their impact on reducing ALE
- Allocate shared control costs to business units based on benefit
- Support funding requests with ROSI and NPV models
Use risk as a driver, not just a constraint, for cybersecurity funding and prioritization.
3. Compliance Operations & Cost Allocation
Compliance costs can be modeled as structured services, not ad hoc burdens:
- Allocate audit, testing, documentation, and tooling costs across lines of business
- Forecast compliance costs for evolving regulations
- Identify high-burden domains and opportunities for automation
Turn compliance into an accountable service with clear cost, ownership, and outcomes.
4. Executive Risk Reporting: Cost, Consumption, and Exposure
Boards want answers to three questions: What are we spending? Who is using it? What risk are we reducing?
- Use TBM to model cybersecurity costs and consumption by service, BU, or product
- Use FAIR to show ALE and risk reduction tied to those investments
- Integrate insights into dashboards, board reports, and strategic plans
Drive confidence, alignment, and shared accountability from the board to the front line.
TBM by Design: Proactively Protecting the Enterprise
Most organizations apply TBM after decisions have been made—tracking cost, performance, and outcomes after deployment. TBM by Design flips this model. It embeds TBM’s financial, consumption, and value insights directly into planning, architecture, scenario modeling, business case development, governance workflows, and decision checkpoints. Rather than reporting or reacting to value assessments after the fact, organizations proactively design for it—before investments are made, before infrastructure is provisioned, and before new features are launched.
Read TBM By Design to see how embedding TBM into planning, governance, and operations ensures technology decisions deliver value from the start.
Similarly, traditional approaches treat risk and security as downstream cost centers. But with growing regulatory pressures and rapid innovation, security investment decisions can’t be made post-deployment. TBM by Design allows CISOs and risk leaders to embed cost, risk, and compliance impact modeling into the earliest stages of technology decisions—from architecture reviews to budget allocation.
How TBM by Design supports Risk:
- Profiles risk exposure during solution planning, not just post-deployment
- Integrates NIST and FAIR-based modeling into governance workflows
- Enables compliance heatmaps by resource, solution, or consumer before rollout
- Supports investment decisions by quantifying cost of mitigation vs. exposure
Embedded TBM delivers:
- Better alignment of security investments to business priorities
- Defensible, risk-justified budgeting
- Avoidance of costly rework or remediation after deployment
- Clear linkage between business value, risk posture, and security spend
Getting Value Quickly from TBM for Security & Compliance
Organizations don’t need full-blown modeling maturity to get started. Quick wins include:
- Map cybersecurity budgets into TBM Cost Pools and Tech Towers
- Define 2-3 core security services (e.g., Endpoint Protection, IAM) as TBM Solutions
- Link a FAIR scenario to a high-value business capability and associate its ALE
- Run a TCO and risk-reduction comparison for two competing investment options
Even basic modeling creates clarity and focus—enabling security and compliance leaders to move from reactive cost justifications to proactive, value-aligned planning.
Take the Next Step
Cybersecurity and compliance are no longer just about defense. They’re about trust, transparency, and strategic value. TBM empowers organizations to manage them with the same discipline, insight, and accountability as any other investment.
Start by mapping what you already know. Partner with your risk and finance leaders. And explore how TBM, FAIR, and NIST together can make your security program a cornerstone of resilience and value.
While you’re here, join the TBM Council to connect with peers and stay updated on all things TBM. Explore our communities to see how others are tackling similar challenges, or check out our Knowledge Base for frameworks, case studies, and how-to guidance. Learn more about the TBM Framework and how it supports smarter decision-making across IT and Finance. You can also attend an upcoming event, pursue training or certification, or see how our partners are contributing to this area of TBM practice.
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