End of Year Bells Are Ringing: How to Balance Cyber Costs with Resilience Goals

This holiday season, in light of looming fears of a recession, many families may be tightening their purse strings and looking for creative alternatives to make their holiday dollars stretch further than in previous years. 

As a business, it’s likely you may have similar concerns, especially as budgets are finalized and set in play for the upcoming year.  

But when it comes to cutbacks and doing without one area you can’t turn a blind eye to is your cybersecurity program. In fact, your cybersecurity controls and protections may be more critical now than at other times of the year, as reports indicate cybercrimes like ransomware tend to increase during the holidays.  

Instead of thinking about where you can cut and save in cyber expenses, flip the script and reframe how you think about cybersecurity investments. Instead of looking for places to chop and cut to save dollars and cents, think instead of the costs you may incur if you don’t have these protections in place. 

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2022 Report, the average cost of a data breach in the United States is more than $9.4 million, compared to $4.35 million as the global average total cost of a data breach. 

When taken into account from that perspective, the real question is how can you not invest in cyber protections to decrease the likelihood you’ll be a victim of a breach.  

So, in these tough economic times, how can you balance your cybersecurity costs with other business protections to ensure you’re on the right foot when the new year rolls around? Here are five suggestions: 

1. Get the right people in the right roles. With a shortage of cybersecurity professionals around the globe, this can sometimes feel nearly impossible, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. In fact, it’s not necessarily about hiring more people with more skills. It’s about ensuring you’ve got the right people where they need to be and enhancing their abilities to do their jobs with other resources such as technology, as well as working closely with industry consultants who can help fill gaps where you have them.  
2. Stop duplicating work with manual, repetitive tasks. Most organizations today work within a range of cybersecurity and compliance controls and frameworks. If your teams are still implementing and managing these controls and frameworks manually, for example, via spreadsheets or word-processing documents, you’re not getting the most bang for your buck. Streamline and automate processes—and free up your team members for more important work—by adopting a SaaS-based cybersecurity framework management platform like Apptega.  
3. Employ continuous risk analysis and risk management practices. If you don’t know your risks, especially as your environment changes, you can’t effectively manage them and that puts you at even greater risk of a breach or other cyber event. Utilize a SaaS-based cybersecurity framework instead of manual processes to routinely track and inventory all of your assets, uncover vulnerabilities and other security weaknesses, and always know exactly which security controls you have in place and if they’re performing as intended—in real time! 
4. Think like an attacker. If you don’t already know which systems and operations are most critical for your business, now is the time to figure that out. Conduct a business impact analysis to determine what the impact might be if you were to lose any of your most important systems and data and make a plan to protect them from potential breaches. What might an attacker see as most valuable to go after within your organization? Identify those risks and make plans to proactively keep them safe and quickly respond and recover when an event may happen. 
5. Know your environment and the threat landscape. Both are constantly evolving, especially when your organization changes or scales. Be one step ahead of attackers by staying up to date on cyber events as they happen in the wild and always keep a pulse on your cybersecurity regulations and compliance requirements. They’re rapidly changing as well. A cybersecurity framework management platform is a great way to track and manage related risks. 

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Follow along in our 12 Days of Cybersecurity on our LinkedIn. Learn more about how Apptega can simplify day-to-day cybersecurity and compliance management and schedule a custom tour of the Apptega platform.