Trimming Security Costs while Safeguarding Your Assets: 7 Effective Strategies - Checkpoint
By Sundar Balasubramanian, Managing Director at Check Point Software Technologies, India & SAARC
In the current economic climate, CISOs face mounting pressure to reduce cyber security spending on account of factors such as waning confidence in the economy, persistent inflation, and shifting priorities. Although fiscal prudence can be challenging and may seemingly present unrealistic expectations, with resourcefulness and ingenuity, cyber security professionals can indeed achieve more with less.
As per a recent survey by PwC in India, the Global Digital Trust Insights – India edition, 69% of business executives said that their cybersecurity budget increased in 2022, and 65% plan to spend more on cyber in 2023. This upward trend in budget allocation underscores the critical importance of cybersecurity in resilience planning. This is further supported by Gartner analyst firm, who forecasts that India Security and Risk Management spending will grow some 8% in 2023, with security services spending to total some 40% of total security spending.
However, the recessionary headwinds have also been impacting various CISOs. Ahead of making the tough decisions, and jettisoning security solutions that appear to have limited ROI, explore the following means of conserving cyber security resources while maintaining morale and preparing for a never-before-seen attack landscape.
To create the best possible scenarios and
outcomes for your organization, CISOs need to :
1.
Make
the most of existing solutions. Many vendors offer consultation and educational resources to help
security professionals fully understand and utilize the capabilities inherent
in existing cyber security tools. There may be instances where expanded use of
one tool could actually allow you to replace and eliminate another tool.
2.
Review
cyber security labor sourcing. Some organizations leverage third-party groups for specific cyber
security work, but – despite the obstacles – it may prove less expensive to bring
those specialties in-house. Or conversely, your enterprise may have a handful
of tasks that would be more cost effective for an MSP or MSSP to take care of.
Consider running differential cost analyses.
3.
Consolidate
cyber security. In some
instances, consolidating cyber security not only increases security
effectiveness and reduces spend, but it can actually drive revenue.
By consolidating cybers security, organizations can increase visibility. With expanded
visibility and an increased number of actionable insights to work with, teams
can respond to risk quickly and achieve more sustainable business performance
over the long term.
4.
Augment
cyber resiliency measures. Despite
the maintenance of strong cyber security teams, global enterprises are
continuing to experience highly disruptive cyber incidents. Continued investments
in backup capabilities and other cyber disaster recovery measures can
formidably save on spend in the event of a breach.
Should you need to win some budget for this, explain the downside revenue risk
of under-investing in this part of a cyber security plan.
5.
Automate
where possible. According to
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report,
organizations that leverage fully deployed AI and automation save $3.05 million
per data breach as compared to organizations that fail to use these tools. In
other words, enterprises that pursue AI and automation can save as much as
65.2% on breach expenses.
6.
Implement
a Zero Trust approach. Zero
Trust reduces the risk of cyber breaches, as it prevents cyber attackers from
exploiting excessive permissions. In some cases, a implementation of a Zero
Trust security strategy has been shown to deliver a 92% return on investment
with a payback period of less than half of a year. Zero Trust can lower the
probability of a data breach by as much as 50%.
7. Think prevention-first. Preventing a disaster is more cost effective than responding to a disaster after the fact. The average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million, and enterprises in the healthcare and finance space often incur much higher costs than average. Quantification of prevention-first ROI must be based on how much loss organizations could avoid with a prevention-first approach. When crunching the numbers, you’ll likely see that a prevention-first oriented security program wins the day.
In conclusion