It's that time of year when IT meets with Finance to determine the budget for the coming year. And this year’s planning process appears to be a gloomy endeavor with the industry-wide view that cyber threats will continue to evolve, both in terms of their destructive capability and their stealth in evading detection. But when it comes to cybersecurity budgets, bigger is not necessarily better.
History has proved that greater spending on cybersecurity products hasn't entailed a better organizational security posture. Despite the millions of dollars spent by organizations year after year, the average cost of a cyber attack jumped by 50% between 2018 and 2019, hitting $4.6 million per incident. The percentage of cyber attacks that cost $10 million or more nearly doubled to 13% over the same period. Yet, the trend of spending more on security products persists due to the rising costs of a security breach. It's no wonder, then, that global spending on cybersecurity is foretasted by Gartner to exceed $124 billion this year.
Strategies to Increase CyberSecurity with a Lower Budget
When researching cybersecurity solutions, here are some cost-efficiency strategies that can be implemented:
• Focus on prevention. Select a solution that stops a cyberattack before execution. A detection-and-response approach costs far more than prevention. Prevention of data breaches or other attacks reduces an organization's financial exposure from all perspectives, paying remediation costs to productivity loss and liability costs.
• Look at the metrics.A cybersecurity vendor should be able to provide metrics that demonstrate its solution achieves high detection rates with low false-positive rates. A high rate of false positives increases labor costs to analyze and assess false alerts and validate programs for inclusion on a whitelist.
• Reduce and minimize security layers. In light of the fact that more agents on an endpoint don’t minimize the likelihood of a breach, try to resist the temptation to implement the many niched products available on the market. A more effective option is to select one platform that provides cover for all devices and operating systems present in an enterprise's ecosystem while also providing the widest possible coverage for the various threat types that are prevalent in your industry.
• Greater automation. There are many sophisticated security tools out there that may provide you with a wealth of data and security information but do very little to actually identify and clean up attacks that have successfully penetrated your organization. This magnifies the risks of alert fatigue in an industry that is already suffering from a cyber skills shortage. Automating more cybersecurity tasks to detect and prevent threats reduces both dependences on human expertise and the risk of human error.
The goal should be to find a single agile solution that can check the box on all these strategies, which combine to increase both cost efficiency and enterprise security