Where Are Corporate Security Budgets Going in 2027?
Insights from more than 100 CSOs on the priorities shaping corporate security investment in 2027
Corporate security budgets are being reshaped around a different kind of security operation.
That’s one of the clearest takeaways from the 2026 Annual CSO Survey, conducted by The Clarity Factory and sponsored by Ontic. The report draws on responses from more than 100 CSOs at multinational corporations with over 3,000 employees globally.
The findings suggest that security budgets aren’t shrinking so much as being redirected. Investment is moving toward intelligence, technology and AI, executive protection, modernized GSOCs, and crisis and resilience capabilities. At the same time, spending is declining in some of the more labor-intensive areas of security operations and across fragmented vendors and tools.
Staffing trends reinforce that shift. Many of the same functions gaining budget are also seeing headcount growth, alongside emerging demand for data scientists and AI and technology specialists.
Taken together, the data points to security organizations building greater capacity in areas that help them understand risk, make faster decisions, and respond more effectively, while increasingly looking to technology to take on work that has traditionally required more people, tools, and manual effort.
2027 corporate security budget trends at a glance
- 70% of CSOs expect technology to account for a larger share of their security budgets over the next two to three years.
- More than 90% of CSOs are already using AI, and 88% say it has increased productivity and workflow efficiency.
- 74% of CSOs now rate geopolitical risk as critical or high, up from 67% in 2025, helping drive greater investment in intelligence platforms and analyst headcount.
- 67% rank ongoing conflict among their top five geopolitical risks, up sharply from 37% in 2025, while the share rating geopolitical risk as critical more than doubled from 13% to 28%.
- Nearly two-thirds of CSOs expect security to invest more in enterprise risk management over the next five years, even as ownership of areas like business continuity becomes more distributed across organizations.
- The number of risks rated critical or high by more than half of CSOs nearly doubled, from four in 2025 to seven in 2026, adding pressure to invest in connected technology solutions that help teams understand and respond to interconnected risks.
Where are security budgets growing in 2027?
01
Intelligence
Intelligence is one of the clearest areas of increased investment across both people and technology.
CSOs report increasing budgets for intelligence platforms and tools, protective and geopolitical intelligence, analysts, fusion centers, and closer integration between intelligence and GSOC functions. Intelligence also tops the list of areas where CSOs report staffing increases.
Increased concern about geopolitical risk helps explain that investment. Seventy-four percent now rate geopolitical risk as critical or high, up from 67% in 2025. More notably, the share rating it as critical has more than doubled, from 13% to 28%. Concern about ongoing conflict has risen even more sharply, with 67% now ranking it among their top five geopolitical risks, compared with just 37% in 2025.
The audience for security intelligence is expanding, too. Business leaders and cybersecurity teams are consuming more of it than they did a year ago. But greater consumption hasn’t necessarily translated into greater influence: only 25% of CSOs say their intelligence products frequently influence business decisions.
For security teams, that raises the bar. Finding threats is only part of the job. Teams increasingly need to understand what those threats mean for their organization by connecting external developments to the executives, employees, locations, events, and operations that could actually be affected.
02
AI, automation, and connected systems
Technology is taking up a larger share of the security budget. Seventy percent of CSOs expect the proportion of their budget dedicated to technology to increase over the next two to three years. Priority investments include AI and automation, physical security technology modernization, integration platforms, and intelligence and data platforms.
AI adoption is already moving quickly. More than 90% of CSOs say their teams use AI, and adoption increased across every area of corporate security measured in the survey. The largest increases came in travel risk management, intelligence reporting, risk and security assessments, and incident management and response.
So far, the biggest payoff is efficiency: 88% of CSOs say AI has increased productivity and workflow efficiency. Cost reduction, however, is not the primary motivation. Only 26% cite it as a driver of AI adoption, and just 13% cite headcount reduction. The report instead finds that AI is primarily increasing capacity and allowing practitioners to shift toward higher-value and more strategic work.
The next opportunity is to use AI to assess risk earlier and improve decision-making. Most security teams are still in the report’s lowest AI maturity tier, focused on productivity and process improvement. A small but growing group is moving toward insight-driven AI that supports risk assessment and operational decisions, while a tiny minority are using AI to enable new operating models and create new value.
Improving AI maturity requires a stronger foundation. The report identifies disjointed data as a barrier to AI maturity, with security data often spread across disconnected platforms. Breaking down those silos and bringing that information together gives AI more complete context to understand relationships, identify patterns, and help security teams surface potential risks sooner.
03
Executive protection
Executive protection stands out as an area where organizations are increasing both staffing and budget. Investment is growing across travel, residential and event security, protection tools, and staffing.
The broader risk environment helps explain that investment. A majority of CSOs now rate travel risk as critical or high, up from roughly one-third in 2025, while geopolitical instability, activism, online sentiment, and workplace tensions are creating additional considerations for protecting senior leaders. That concern has only intensified following years of high-profile incidents involving corporate executives.
That complexity also increases the need for technology that can connect intelligence with the operational details of protection. A severe weather alert or breaking news event could affect an executive’s flight, route, driver handoff, or meeting plans. Protection teams need to quickly understand who and what is affected, make the necessary changes, and carry those changes through the rest of the trip. As organizations invest more in executive protection, technology that gives teams that connected view can help them make those additional resources more effective.
04
GSOC expansion and modernization
Investment in GSOCs is growing too, but the nature of that is changing.
CSOs report putting budget toward GSOC expansion initiatives, such as modernization, fusion center creation, integration of systems and intelligence, and operational centralization. At the same time, operator-level GSOC roles are declining, and organizations report reducing spending on manual GSOC operations.
The report frames this as a shift from monitoring centers to intelligence and coordination hubs. Rather than primarily watching systems and passing along information, more strategically focused GSOCs are being built to bring information together, determine what is relevant, and help coordinate the response.
That makes integration central to modernization. Intelligence, physical security systems, incidents, investigations, and business context all provide different pieces of the same picture. Bringing those pieces together gives GSOC teams a sharper way to determine what requires attention rather than simply increasing the volume of information they have to monitor.
05
Crisis and resilience
Crisis and resilience is another area seeing growth in both staffing and investment. CSOs cite increased spending on crisis management exercises, business continuity, travel risk management, and operational risk management tools.
Interestingly, that investment is growing even as corporate security becomes less likely to hold primary accountability for some adjacent risks, such as business continuity. Only 30% of CSOs reported owning business continuity outright, down from 43% in 2025. Instead, more CSOs are sharing responsibility alongside other business functions.
That distinction points to a larger change in corporate security’s role. Security may not own every risk, but it is increasingly expected to help the organization understand and coordinate across them. Nearly two-thirds of CSOs expect their teams to make a larger contribution to enterprise risk management over the next five years.
As crisis and resilience programs evolve, the ability to connect intelligence, incidents, people, locations, and response procedures becomes increasingly important.
Where are security budgets decreasing in 2027?
The budget reductions reported in the survey tell just as much of a story as the increases. Some of the clearest cuts are happening where organizations see opportunities to reduce manual work or simplify fragmented operating environments.
Guard force spend is declining as organizations expand automation and remote monitoring, with some CSOs also citing low return on investment.
Vendor and third-party spending is being consolidated as teams reduce the use of fragmented intelligence tools. Rather than continuing to add standalone systems, organizations are looking for ways to make more of their existing information usable together.
Corporate security travel budgets are being reduced in some cases because increased regional hiring provides local coverage without requiring as much team travel.
Manual GSOC operations are also seeing reductions as investment shifts toward modernization, automation, integrated systems, and higher-value GSOC roles.
Taken together, these changes suggest that CSOs are becoming more deliberate about where human capacity provides the greatest value, likely due to AI. Routine monitoring and repetitive work are increasingly candidates for automation, while investment moves toward intelligence, analysis, judgment, coordination, and response.
Security investment is moving toward connection
There is a common thread running through many of these investment decisions. Data and organizational silos tied for the top challenge to corporate security effectiveness, alongside a low understanding of security among business leaders. CSOs also agree more strongly than they did in 2025 that organizational silos and fragmented data negatively affect their ability to protect their organizations.
At the same time, security teams are navigating a broader and increasingly interconnected set of risks, making it more important to understand how threats, people, places, and events relate to one another.
Together, these trends make fragmentation increasingly difficult to sustain.
A geopolitical event can affect an executive traveling in the region, raise concerns about a facility or employee population, trigger activity within the GSOC, and require coordination with teams across the business. An employee grievance can become an insider risk or workplace violence concern. Online activism can evolve into physical disruption or a digital threat to an executive.
When the intelligence, people, locations, incidents, investigations, and procedures behind those situations remain disconnected, security teams have to build the full picture themselves.
The investment trends in this year’s survey point toward a different model. CSOs are investing more resources into intelligence, AI, integration, more sophisticated GSOCs, executive protection, and resilience while consolidating fragmented tools and automating more manual work.
The real opportunity is how security teams can make those investments work together. Connecting intelligence with the people and places your organization protects, and carrying that context into the workflows used to assess and respond to risk, creates the foundation for earlier risk identification, faster decisions, and a more coordinated security operation.
