The ROI Case for SANS: How Cybersecurity Training Pays for Itself

This blog is the second in a three-part series highlighting key findings from the IDC White Paper, Sponsored by SANS Institute, “The Business Value of SANS,” Doc #EUR153291525, June 2025. Blog No. 2 focuses on the financial lens, analyzing how SANS training delivers measurable ROI through cost avoidance, productivity gains, and reduced vendor dependency.

Cybersecurity budgets are under intense pressure today. In a recent Gartner survey, 71% of CFOs expected to reduce costs this year, with technology and operations spending receiving closer scrutiny than ever before. Meanwhile, PwC’s 2025 Global Digital Trust Insights Report found that 65% of executives expect security budgets to stay flat or shrink despite rising incident volumes, increased regulatory complexity, and growing expectations around resilience.

When scrutiny intensifies, it drives a shift in how CISOs, CFOs, and procurement leaders evaluate cybersecurity spend – investments are judged less by technical scope and more by their measurable business impact. This is especially true for cybersecurity training. In many organizations, workforce development is still treated as a discretionary expense; a nice-to-have benefit when times are good, but a cuttable line item when they’re not. However, that framing misses a critical point. The real cost isn’t in what you spend on training. It’s in what you spend when your team isn’t trained: prolonged incidents, repeatable mistakes, and overreliance on expensive external help.

• Prolonged incidents: IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.4 million in 2024. On average, it took 276 days to identify and contain a data breach across various environments.
• Repeatable mistakes: Check Point’s 2025 Cloud Security Report found that 65% of organizations suffered a cloud-related security incident in 2024, yet just 9% detected it within the first hour and only 6% remediated within that span. Many of these failures were tied to human error, highlighting recurring operational weak points.
• Overreliance on external help: Forrester’s 2024 Cybersecurity Benchmarks Report found that incident handling consumed an average of 13.5% of a global cybersecurity budget. This category often covers external incident responders, consulting firms, and forensic services, especially when internal teams are under-resourced and lack the right skills.

Each of these pain points reinforces a central truth: when internal security teams aren’t positioned to succeed, organizations pay for it — in time, money, and external dependency.

Prioritizing targeted training at scale is one of the most effective ways to shift that dynamic. New data from the SANS-sponsored IDC white paper The Business Value of SANS shows that when training is aligned to operational outcomes, it becomes a performance enabler and cost control strategy that delivers significant return on investment (ROI). The IDC white paper, based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of organizations, including those in manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and more and vary significantly in size, with employee numbers ranging from 1,500 to 350,000 and revenues ranging from $650 million to $108 billion, found that organizations investing in SANS training realized an average of $3.57 million in annual business value — including direct financial savings, productivity improvements, and avoided external spend.

Reducing Cost Through Containment, Not Cutting

The most expensive costs in security aren’t always budgeted. They show up as vendor overages, breach response retainers, fraud losses, and post-incident audits. SANS training helps reduce those costs through proactive prevention, detection, and response capabilities. Across the organizations interviewed in the IDC white paper, the most financially significant impacts of SANS training came from the ability to contain costs through smarter execution. On average, organizations avoided $893,700 in external cybersecurity costs (equivalent to €777,519 and £661,338) and $990,600 in fraud-related losses (equivalent to €861,822 and £733,044) annually.

These weren’t line items trimmed from budgets, they were costs that never materialized because internal teams had the precision to detect threats quickly and the fluency to avoid missteps that hindered their response efficiency. Teams that had previously relied on third-party assessments, remediation support, or forensic services were able to insource that work post-training. In some cases, they prevented incidents altogether. In others, they resolved them fast enough to avoid vendor escalation or legal exposure.

The IDC white paper doesn’t argue against the need to do more with less. It shows what’s possible when teams are equipped to operate without leaning so heavily on vendors for routine or high-pressure response. That shift alone freed up nearly $1.9 million (equivalent to €1.65 million and £1.4 million) annually, and in several instances allowed organizations to redeploy that spend toward modernization efforts rather than plugging recurring gaps.

Increasing Output Without Increasing Headcount

Every security leader knows the pressures of staffing today. Your headcount’s frozen, but your project backlog is growing, and threats aren’t slowing down. The organizations cited in the IDC white paper weren’t expanding their teams. Many were actively freezing headcount or reassigning roles. However, nearly all of them saw measurable gains in throughput after investing in SANS training. On average, SANS-trained practitioners delivered 24% more productive time, while compliance teams improved efficiency by 20%.

In practical terms, this meant faster incident response, more reliable controls implementation, and stronger participation in strategic initiatives. Improved team-wide performance helped organizations close readiness gaps without adding headcount. And the impact extended well beyond the SOC. Trained practitioners acted as “internal accelerators” who improved documentation, mentored peers, helped architect more secure deployments, and reduced friction across departments. Several organizations noted that after training, their teams became more visible, more engaged, and more influential across the business.

This translated into measurable financial value. Organizations saw 26.9% fewer new hires needed annually and $124,000 (equivalent to €107.880 and £91,760) in annual hiring cost reductions — not because roles disappeared, but because their people were able to do more and stay longer. One banking respondent noted that SANS-trained employees “started turning down higher-paying offers” because they saw a clear path to growth internally.

Turning Training into a Strategic Cost Control

The IDC white paper’s analysis of ROI was tied directly to financial performance. On average, each SANS-trained employee drove $52,700 (equivalent to €45.849 and £38,998) in annual business value. Organizations realized a 427% ROI over three years, with a payback period of less than 12 months.

Beyond the numbers, what stands out is why SANS training drives that kind of ROI. It’s rooted in the way the training maps directly to real-world environments. Whether it’s in cloud security, detection engineering, ICS/OT, or incident response, SANS curriculums are defined by industry practitioners and designed to be applied immediately. That creates a return visible not just in metrics, but in day-to-day execution. One utilities leader interviewed by IDC explained it this way: “We don’t measure ROI just in cost avoidance. We measure it in confidence. Our team knows what to do, and that lets the rest of the business move faster.”

In that sense, SANS training serves as a critical performance enabler. For financial and security leaders looking to reduce risk without scaling headcount or vendor reliance, this is where premium training earns its place as part of the enterprise cost-efficiency strategy.

Discover the Financial Impact of SANS Training

In a constrained environment, every investment comes under scrutiny. CISOs, CFOs, and procurement teams need hard data that proves internal investments produce real business results. That’s what the IDC white paper delivers, and it’s why organizations across sectors are reevaluating how they classify workforce development — not as discretionary spend, but as a tool for risk reduction, cost control, and long-term capability building.

Download the IDC White Paper, sponsored by SANS Institute, The Business Value of SANS (Doc #EUR153291525, June 2025) to learn more about how organizations are leveraging SANS training to reduce vendor spend, improve team productivity, and avoid costly incidents all while staying within budget.