I founded Peerlyst as a no-spin zone where the information security community can share real-world experience, coming up with solutions to common (and not-so-common) problems. To my delight, that’s exactly what’s been happening—and we announced an exciting milestone earlier this month. PeerSource Budget is a crowdsourced tool that gives InfoSec professionals powerful new capabilities for developing and analyzing security budgets.

Editor's Note: You can download PeerSource Budget for free and join Peerlyst to propose changes to make it better.

Here’s how PeerSource Budget came into the world: Terry Gold, one of our community members and the founder of IDanalytics, kept hearing that there was no good tool—and not even much useful advice—on putting together a security budget. So he pulled together a team of Peerlyst members, used Peerlyst to get feedback from other security pros, and six weeks later, the group released a beta tool for managing an InfoSec budget.

What Does PeerSource Budget Do?
PeerSource Budget was built from ground up to accommodate dynamic data and updates. It starts off with a baseline and sample data, but there are configuration sheets to revise and define elements. Reporting is dynamic, so you can view the output in the ways that are most useful to you by pushing buttons to change the context and model different scenarios.

• Tracks surplus and deficits to support decision-making on new allocations.
• Dynamically models how different amounts of overall budget can impact an enterprise’s ability to deliver improved security.
• Provides a visual model that conveys financial discipline and makes budgeting decisions clear to other stakeholders. 

As we get PeerSource Budget in the hands of more people in our community and receive their feedback, we’ll update the tool to make it even more specific, capable, and useful. 

With the global InfoSec workforce running a deficiency of 1.5 million employees, our users are staggering under heavy workloads. PeerSource Budget is one of the ways to lighten that load and make their jobs easier, and we’ll support users in rolling out more crowdsourced solutions in the near future. InfoSec people keep telling me that they don’t have the tools they need, or want better ones. 

By Limor Elbaz, CEO of Peerlyst