The 2027 Offensive Security Budget & Strategy Guide

By Paul Petefish. 20 years in offensive security, 1,000+ penetration tests scoped and delivered. Author of the Continuous Penetration Testing Methodology.

Attackers are getting in through your perimeter again, and the breach-fear pitch stopped working. Here is how to build an offensive security budget for 2027 that funds the testing your risk actually calls for, and how to get it approved.

The 2027 plan, up front

If you are building an offensive security budget for next year, five things should shape it.

1. Fund testing by risk. Put the money where the exposure is, which right now means the internet-facing assets that change often. Test hardest where a breach would cost the most.
2. Move routine testing toward continuous, starting at the perimeter. Shift part of your point-in-time spend to coverage that runs year round, so a new exposure gets caught in days instead of at next year's engagement. Attackers now use AI to find and hit exposed systems faster, and edge devices and VPNs as the exploited target grew almost eightfold in a single year (Verizon, 2025 DBIR). That makes continuous coverage of the perimeter the piece you cannot skip.
3. Frame the ask around revenue. A strong offensive security program does two jobs at once. It protects the revenue your systems earn by finding and closing the paths an attacker would use. And if you sell to enterprises that vet their vendors' security before they buy, it also enables revenue, because a current penetration test report is what clears those vendor security reviews and keeps the deal moving. Lead with that, because the breach-scare pitch is now the weakest ask in the room.
4. Put AI-driven testing on your external apps and APIs. If you run external web applications or APIs the business depends on, add AI-driven testing now, even if you just finished a test. It finds application vulnerabilities the other methods miss. More on that below.
5. Include purple teaming to sharpen detection and response. A penetration test tells you what an attacker can reach; a purple team tells you whether you would catch them. Running offense and defense together tunes your detections, closes logging gaps, and measures how fast your team detects and responds. More on that below.

Two numbers frame the whole year. Exploitation of vulnerabilities as the way attackers get in grew 34% last year and now sits behind only stolen credentials (Verizon, 2025 DBIR). And security budgets are basically flat, yet 64% of CISOs expect an increase in 2027 (IANS, 2026 Security Budget Benchmark). So the attack surface is moving back toward the perimeter at the same moment you have one shot to argue for more money. The rest of this guide is how to spend that shot well.

Where offensive security spend sits today

Security budgets are tight and getting tighter as a share of IT. IANS, surveying more than 500 security executives in September 2026, put the average security budget at 9.9% of IT spend, down from 10.9% the year before, and the lowest it has been since 2021. Average growth was about 5%, median growth was zero for the second year running, and only 45% of CISOs got any increase at all. AI is eating the new money, usually out of IT and data budgets instead of security's own line.

Against that, Gartner forecasts global information security spending of $244 billion in 2026, up 11.6%. The pool is growing. Your slice of it probably is not.

Penetration testing is a small, fast-growing corner of that pool. The market is somewhere around $2.1 to $2.8 billion in 2026 and growing 15 to 17% a year (Grand View, Straits Research). The continuous and subscription-based side is growing faster: penetration testing as a service is compounding at roughly 22% a year, continuous penetration testing at about 19% (MarketsandMarkets, Polaris, 360iResearch). Buyers are moving toward testing that keeps running between the annual engagements.

There is no clean public number for offensive security as a share of the security budget, and I am not going to invent one. From the testing I have scoped over the years, it is usually a low single-digit slice. That is the gap this guide is about. The way attackers get in has shifted toward exactly the thing a penetration test is built to find, and most programs still fund testing like it is a compliance checkbox.

The entry point moved back to your perimeter

For a few years the story was phishing and stolen credentials. That is still true, credential abuse is the top initial access vector at 22% of breaches (Verizon, 2025 DBIR). But the thing that changed, and the thing that matters for how you test, is the return of the exploited vulnerability.

Verizon's 2025 DBIR put exploitation of vulnerabilities at 20% of breaches as the initial access step, up 34% in a single year, and that came right after a 180% jump the year before. It has passed phishing for second place. Mandiant's M-Trends 2025 found the same thing from a different dataset: exploits were the number one initial infection vector at 33%, the fifth year in a row.

The sharpest part of the Verizon data is where the exploits landed. Edge devices and VPNs as the exploited target grew almost eightfold, from 3% of exploitation cases to 22%. Organizations tried to patch them, and still only 54% were fully fixed within the year, at a median of 32 days to close. Attackers know that window exists. Your firewall, your VPN concentrator, your file-transfer appliance, the boxes that have to touch the internet are the ones being turned into front doors.

For budgeting, the takeaway is plain. If your test plan still weights internal and application work by old habit and treats the external perimeter as a once-a-year afterthought, you are funding last year's attacks. The money should follow the exposure.

Risk-based testing: deciding what to test and how hard

A risk-based program starts from a simple question asked asset by asset: if someone broke this, how much would it cost us, and how likely is it. You test hardest where the answer is "a lot" and "very." Everything else gets a lighter touch. This sounds obvious, and almost nobody budgets this way, because compliance calendars push everyone toward testing everything once a year at the same depth.

Three things decide where an asset lands: how exposed it is, how much the business depends on it, and how fast it changes. An internet-facing API that processes payments and ships new code every week is a different risk from an internal HR tool that has not changed since 2023. They should not get the same test on the same schedule.

Here is a starting model. Tier your assets, then match the test type and cadence to the tier.

The point of the table is to spend your Tier 1 dollars like Tier 1 matters.

Continuous penetration testing is the natural next step

The annual penetration test is a compliance artifact. It made sense when environments changed slowly and a point-in-time snapshot stayed true for a year. That world is gone. You ship code weekly, your cloud footprint moves daily, and new CVEs land on your edge devices whenever an attacker finds one. A test from March tells you almost nothing about the thing you deployed in July.

Continuous penetration testing closes that gap. Instead of one deep look a year, you keep a team and tooling trained on your highest-risk assets year round, re-testing as things change and as new vulnerabilities surface. It is the model I wrote up as the Continuous Penetration Testing Methodology, and the market is moving the same direction on its own: the continuous and subscription side is growing 19 to 22% a year while one-off testing grows half as fast.

Continuous does not mean you double the budget. For most companies it means re-weighting. You keep a smaller number of deep, manual, point-in-time engagements for the hard problems, the chained attack paths, the red team, the things a human has to think through. And you move routine coverage of the perimeter and the fast-changing apps onto a continuous footing so the 32-day patch window stops being a 32-day open door. The deep tests go up in value because the continuous layer already cleared the noise.

Good continuous testing also emulates what attackers are actually doing right now. That means external-first, since that is where the entries are. It means assumed-breach scenarios, since credential abuse is still the top vector and you should know what happens after someone is already in. And it means the current techniques, not a 2019 playbook. A test that does not look like a real attacker is theater, and you are paying full price for it.

Put AI-driven testing on your external apps and APIs

One recommendation I will state plainly. If you have any external web application or API footprint, especially one the business depends on, get AI-driven testing on it now. Do this even if you just finished a penetration test, and even if you already run continuous testing. It is a different kind of look, and it finds things the others miss.

AI is very good at turning up application vulnerabilities nobody has found before, the kind buried in business logic and in how one endpoint trusts another. It gets better the more context you give it. Source code is the strongest input, and the results with it are hard to match. Source code is not required, though. There is a sliding scale: API documentation, code comments, release notes, a data-flow diagram. Each piece you hand the model sharpens what it finds, and you get useful results well short of full source access.

This is an edge the attacker does not get. The crews pointing AI at your perimeter are working from the outside, blind, with no source and no documentation. You can give your own AI tester the source, the design docs, the release notes, all of it. The more context you feed it, the further ahead of that blackbox attacker you are, so give it as much as you can.

Here is why it belongs in a 2027 budget. Attackers are already pointing these same tools at your perimeter, which is where the DBIR says footholds are being won. Fund a recurring AI-driven pass on your critical external apps and APIs as its own line, separate from your human-led deep tests. The two find different things, and you want both.

Add purple teaming to tune detection and response

A penetration test answers one question: can an attacker get in and reach something that matters. Purple teaming answers the next one: would you catch them if they did. You run the offensive testers and your defensive team together, in the same room or the same channel, replaying real attack techniques while the blue team watches their tools light up or stay dark.

The payoff is direct. You find the logging gaps and the alerts that never fired. You tune detection rules against live technique instead of theory. You get a real number for how long it takes your team to detect and respond, and you watch that number come down over successive runs. Your analysts learn the attacker's moves firsthand, which is the kind of training no course sells.

For 2027, purple teaming is where your detection and response spend proves itself. You have already paid for the EDR, the SIEM, and the SOC. A purple team is how you find out they work before an attacker does the testing for you. Budget a couple of focused exercises a year against the techniques most likely to be used on you.

How to win the 2027 budget

This is where most offensive security asks fall apart, and the fix is well documented. Lead with the business, put the risk in dollars, and leave fear out of it.

A strong offensive security program does two things for revenue, and both belong in the ask. It protects revenue by finding and closing the exploitable paths into the systems that earn it, before an attacker turns one into downtime, a ransom, or a disclosure. And it enables revenue by producing the current, credible proof of security that enterprise buyers now demand before they sign. Same program, both sides of the ledger.

Start with the revenue. The strongest version of a security budget request names the revenue-bearing system at risk and what a failure there costs: downtime, lost sales, contract penalties, regulatory fines, customers who leave. This is cyber risk quantification, and the open standard is FAIR, which expresses a risk as annualized loss exposure, a dollar range built from how often a loss event would happen and how much it would cost, instead of a red-yellow-green rating. As the FAIR Institute puts it, a color has no return on investment. You cannot calculate the return on moving a system from "red" to "yellow." You can calculate the return on spending $120K to remove $2.7M in probable loss.

Offensive security is unusually good at feeding that model. A penetration test produces real evidence that a specific, exploitable path into a revenue system exists, and a retest proves you closed it. That before-and-after, control effectiveness measured in dollars, is exactly what an audit committee is chartered to review, and it is the one thing most security line items cannot produce. You can show the board a door that was open, what it would have cost if someone walked through it, and the receipt that says it is shut.

Then make the growth argument, and run it through the same program. For a company that sells to other businesses, a clean, current penetration test is one of the first things an enterprise buyer or their security team asks for in diligence. A stale report, or a thin one, stalls the deal. Fresh, credible testing clears the security questionnaire and the third-party review faster, which pulls revenue forward. Continuous testing makes this easier, because you always have current evidence on hand instead of scrambling to book a test when a big contract needs one. Gartner reports that 85% of CEOs see cybersecurity as critical to business growth. Track how fast your testing clears these reviews and tie it to pipeline.

And drop the breach scare, because the data says it backfires. IANS found that only 3% of CISOs who won a budget increase credited a major industry breach, and it delivered the smallest bump of any factor, around 9%. Business and operational risk drove 48%. Bring three funding scenarios instead of one number, show what protection you buy at each level, and let leadership choose the trade-off. That is the shape of an ask that gets funded.

Frequently asked questions

How much should we budget for penetration testing in 2027?

There is no single right number, because it scales with your attack surface and your risk, not your headcount. A better approach is to tier your assets by exposure and value, fund continuous coverage for the critical internet-facing ones, and size the deep tests around your Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems. Benchmark any quote against what it actually includes, since prices for "a penetration test" vary 200 to 300% for the same scope depending on whether you are buying a real manual test or a scan with a report.

How often should we run a penetration test?

The honest answer is: as often as the asset changes and as its risk justifies. The annual default is a compliance artifact. A payment API that ships weekly needs continuous or at least monthly testing; a stable internal tool gets a penetration test every year. Match the cadence to the rate of change and the blast radius.

Is continuous penetration testing worth it over an annual test?

For your highest-risk, fastest-changing assets, yes. An annual snapshot goes stale the next time you deploy. Continuous testing keeps coverage on the perimeter and the apps that change, so a new exposure gets caught in days instead of at next year's engagement. Keep the deep, manual, point-in-time tests for the hard problems and move routine coverage to continuous.

What is risk-based penetration testing?

Testing effort allocated by how exposed an asset is, how much the business depends on it, and how fast it changes, instead of testing everything on the same annual cadence. You test hardest where a breach would cost the most and is most likely.

How do I justify an offensive security budget to the board?

Lead with the revenue at risk, put the exposure in dollars using a model like FAIR, and show the before-and-after from a test and retest as proof of risk reduction. Skip the breach-scare pitch; the data shows it is the weakest argument available.

Does penetration testing help win deals, or only avoid breaches?

Both. A strong offensive program protects revenue by closing the exploitable paths into the systems that earn it, and it enables revenue because a current penetration test report is what clears an enterprise buyer's security questionnaire and diligence. Fresh testing shortens procurement; a stale or missing report stalls the deal. Continuous testing keeps that evidence current, so a big contract never waits on you to schedule a test.

Should we use AI-driven penetration testing?

Yes, especially on external web applications and APIs that matter to the business. AI testing is very good at finding application vulnerabilities that have not been found before, and it works on top of a point-in-time test or continuous testing. Run it even if you just tested. Source code is the strongest input, but it is not required: API documentation, code comments, and release notes all improve the results on a sliding scale. Treat it as a recurring pass on your critical external apps and APIs.

What is purple teaming, and should we budget for it?

Purple teaming runs offensive testers and your defensive team together, replaying real attack techniques so you can see what your tools catch and what they miss. It tunes detections, closes logging gaps, and measures how fast you detect and respond. If you have spent money on an EDR, a SIEM, or a SOC, purple teaming is how you prove that spend works. Budget a couple of focused exercises a year against the techniques most likely to be used on you.

Where Lion Security fits

We do not perform testing, and we do not sell you a platform. Lion Security is a vendor-neutral marketplace that helps security leaders scope the right tests, compare vetted vendors on real terms, and manage the engagements end to end. If you are rebuilding your offensive security plan for 2027 and want help turning it into a scoped, benchmarked set of engagements, that is the part we do. The strategy above is yours to run with either way.