Higher education cybersecurity leaders face a familiar budget hurdle: many institutions still treat security as an overhead expense rather than a risk-reduction investment, according to commentary from Palo Alto Networks executives. In a discussion framed around how CISOs can win internal budget conversations, Fadi Fadhil—field CIO and director of field strategy at Palo Alto Networks—argued that campus decision makers need clearer, simpler links between security spending and reduced institutional risk. The framing targets a common institutional challenge: higher education’s federated IT environments, where decision rights and operational responsibilities are distributed across central IT, colleges, and vendor-managed systems. Those structures complicate planning and make outcome-based messaging more important. For university administrators, the emphasis is on repositioning cybersecurity as core institutional protection—particularly as campuses pursue cloud tools, AI-enabled services, and new data-intensive learning workflows that expand the attack surface.