Budgets may not be shrinking, but they certainly aren’t keeping up with the complexity and scale of today’s threat landscape. According to the 2025 SANS Detection & Response Survey, most security teams are being asked to expand their capabilities without receiving the resources they need to match rising expectations.
This mismatch between demands and funding is pushing organizations to rethink how they allocate time, tools, and investment. Here are the key budget-related insights from the SANS report and what they mean for detection and response programs in 2026.
The survey shows that 28% of organizations consider their detection and response budget “insufficient," up significantly from last year. Even more telling, only 25% believe their funding is truly “sufficient.” The resource gap is widening, and teams are expected to cover more environments (cloud, multicloud, SaaS, hybrid) without proportional increases in funding.
38% of respondents characterize their budget as “adequate but limited.” This group has enough funding to maintain operations, but not enough to invest in improvements or innovation. This translates to teams struggling to keep up with threats simply by maintaining the status quo. Flat budgets + rising complexity = reduced effectiveness.
Looking ahead, 44% of organizations expect only a moderate increase in their detection and response budgets. Meanwhile, only 5% anticipate a significant increase, which is down from last year. It seems that even as threats escalate, funding won’t. Organizations must prioritize efficiency, automation, and smarter visibility, not bigger spending.
Budget limitations directly affect hiring, training, and retention. The survey highlights persistent skill and resource gaps and identifies staffing as one of the biggest obstacles to timely response.
This means that technology investments must not only provide coverage, but they must also reduce the workload, not add to it.
The most important insight from the budget data is this: Organizations can’t afford to invest in tools that increase noise, require constant tuning, or demand specialized expertise to operate.
This is where a Network Detection and Response (NDR) offers strong ROI by:
For organizations working under “adequate but limited” or “insufficient” budgets, NDR can serve as a force multiplier that helps teams maximize the impact of their existing security investments.
The 2025 SANS Detection & Response Survey makes one reality clear: security teams are operating in an era where expectations are growing faster than budgets. Most organizations won’t receive the significant financial increases needed to expand staffing, overhaul tooling, or rebuild processes. Instead, they must make targeted investments in solutions that improve efficiency, reduce complexity, and offer measurable gains in detection performance.
This shift transforms efficiency from a nice-to-have into a strategic requirement. When funding is limited, every tool in the stack has to justify its value. Investments that create additional noise, require constant tuning, or operate in silos ultimately cost more than they deliver. The SANS findings reflect this: constrained budgets expose the weaknesses in disconnected or narrowly focused detection approaches.
This is where NDR becomes vital - not as an additional luxury tool, but as a cost-efficient foundation for modern security operations. NDR strengthens the overall detection strategy by correlating behavior across the environment, revealing threats that would otherwise require multiple disparate tools to identify, and reducing the manual effort needed to validate or investigate activity. In a resource-limited environment, this consolidation of insight is essential. It enables teams to get more value from their existing security investments, and to focus analyst time where it matters most.
Budget challenges aren’t going away. But organizations can still materially improve their detection posture by prioritizing solutions that amplify the impact of their current teams and tools. The SANS survey reinforces a critical truth: effectiveness isn’t about making costly upgrades, it’s about investing in the capabilities that deliver meaningful clarity, efficiency, and resilience. NDR is one of the few technologies positioned to provide that level of operational leverage, making it an essential part of a sustainable detection and response strategy in the year ahead.
If you're interested in reading the full 2025 SANS Detection and Response Survey, you can download it here. For more information on our Clear NDR solution, visit our product page or click the demo link, listed below the author bio.