What does it cost not to have a CIO or CISO? Calculate the hidden cost of technology leadership gaps. Wasted spend, unmanaged risk and opportunity cost.
No calculator can be precise about future downtime, breaches or project outcomes, and any tool that claims to is overselling. This one is built to be honest about that: it uses your own inputs plus named UK benchmarks, states every assumption, and always gives a low-to-high range rather than a single number. Treat it as a structured estimate to inform a conversation, not a forecast.
Breach likelihood is anchored to the UK Government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026. Breach cost ranges use that survey and the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 (UK). Project value-at-risk is informed by the McKinsey and University of Oxford study of more than 5,400 IT projects. Leadership costs use current UK market day rates and salary benchmarks. Full details are in the Sources note.
Because the real world is wide. A minor breach might cost a few thousand pounds; a serious data breach can run to millions. A well-governed project might land on budget; a poorly governed one can lose half its value. Narrow numbers would be false precision. The width of the range is itself useful information about your exposure.
A fractional leader works part-time on an ongoing basis (often one to four days a month or week), giving you senior judgement without a full-time salary. An interim leader provides full-time cover for a fixed period, usually three to six months, often to steady a situation or lead a specific programme. The calculator lets you compare both against a permanent hire.
In a large enterprise, no. In the mid-market, a single experienced leader frequently covers both technology direction and security oversight, because the two are deeply linked and a separate full-time CISO is hard to justify at that scale. The right answer depends on your size, sector and data sensitivity, which is exactly what a scoping conversation establishes.
Yes. The calculator relabels revenue as income and the same logic holds: downtime still costs staff time, failed projects still waste restricted funds, and a breach of beneficiary or donor data carries the same UK GDPR exposure as any business. Smaller organisations often feel these losses more acutely because there is less slack to absorb them.
That widely quoted Gartner figure is from 2014 and was an average across very large organisations; other studies the same year ranged from roughly 2,300 to 9,000 dollars per minute. None of those are representative of a UK mid-market organisation, so applying them would inflate the result. We build downtime cost from your own staffing and outage inputs instead.
No, and we will not pretend it does. Outages, project risk and breaches never go to zero. The honest case is that experienced leadership reduces how often these things happen and how badly they hurt when they do, and materially improves the odds that your technology projects deliver. The calculator estimates the size of the gap; it does not promise to eliminate it.
Starkhorn is an independent technology and security leadership consultancy. We provide fractional and interim CIO-CISO advisory and project assurance. We do not sell software, cyber insurance, certification, or anything on commission, so our advice is not steering you toward a product. This calculator is a free planning aid, not a sales gate.