Executive Summary:
In the current economic climate, CISOs face increasing pressure to reduce cybersecurity spending due to factors such as declining confidence in the economy, continued inflation and changing business priorities. Although fiscal prudence can be challenging and may seemingly present unrealistic expectations, with resourcefulness and ingenuity, cybersecurity professionals can indeed achieve more with less.
Before making the tough decisions, and eliminating security solutions that appear to have limited ROI, consider the following measures to conserve cyber security resources while maintaining morale and preparing for an unprecedented attack landscape. Create the best scenarios and outcomes for your organization.
Here’s how to get started
1. Make the most of existing solutions. Many vendors offer consulting and educational resources to help security professionals understand and fully utilize the capabilities inherent in existing cybersecurity tools. There may be times when extended use of one tool can actually allow you to replace or disable another tool.
2. Review the sources of cyber security work. Some organizations are leveraging third-party groups for specific cybersecurity work, but — despite the hurdles — it may prove less expensive to bring those specialties in-house. Or conversely, your organization may have a handful of tasks that would be more cost-effective for an MSP or MSSP to handle. Consider running differential cost analyses.
3. Unification of cyber security. In some cases, cyber security consolidation not only increases security effectiveness and reduces expenses, but it can actually generate revenue.
By consolidating cybersecurity, organizations can increase visibility. With expanded visibility and a higher number of insights to work with, teams can respond to risks quickly and achieve more sustainable business performance in the long term.
4. Increasing cyber resilience measures. Despite maintaining strong cyber security teams, global organizations continue to see disruptive cyber incidents. Ongoing investments in backup capabilities and other cyber disaster recovery measures can help you save on expenses in the event of a breach. If you have to win any budget for this, explain the negative revenue risk of underinvesting in this part of a cybersecurity plan.
5. Automation where possible. as per IBM data breach report cost, organizations that leverage fully deployed AI and automation save $3.05 million per data breach compared to organizations that fail to use these tools. In other words, organizations that pursue AI and automation can save up to 65.2% in breach expenses.
6. Implement a zero trust approach. Zero Trust reduces the risk of cyber breaches, as it prevents cyber attackers from exploiting excessive privileges. In some cases, implementing a Zero Trust security strategy has been shown to provide a 92% Return on investment with a payback period of less than six months. Zero trust can lower the probability of a data breach by up to 50%.
7. Think about prevention first. Disaster prevention is more cost-effective than disaster response after the fact. The average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million, and healthcare and financial organizations often suffer greatly Higher Above average costs. Quantifying the ROI of prevention first must be based on the amount of loss that organizations can avoid with a prevention first approach. When you crunch the numbers, you’ll likely see that a prevention-focused security program wins the day.
In conclusion
Organizations can prepare and succeed in the face of slashed cyber security budgets. Cyber security is all about innovation. To that end, budget constraints simply represent an opportunity to approach security in innovative and new ways in order to achieve stronger results. During this challenging time, take advantage of the above insights to proactively improve your cybersecurity posture.
For more insights on getting more with less, check out CyberTalk.org’s past coverage. Finally, for more advanced real-time cybersecurity news, insights and analysis, subscribe to cybertalk.org newsletter.
