How does cybersecurity play a central role in your company’s financial success?

Upended by the pandemic, India’s digital leap is well under way. After a bit of a rocky start, the country’s cybersecurity product ecosystem has grown phenomenally, to meet the rising cyberattacks and information theft that had drastically impacted the whole nation.

While we cruised through one of the roughest times in India’s data theft history, we were encouraged to level up our cybersecurity parameters and revolutionize the way our businesses operated. From 175 cybersecurity firms in 2018 to 225 in 2020, a staggering CAGR of 39% in industry revenue, and quickly becoming the top country in revenue split by geography – it’s been a very long ride.

In a dominantly digital and hyper-connected world, one would think spending on the cybersecurity sector is going to go overboard. But that’s just another myth we intend to debunk. If you think your resources can potentially run short as your business scales up in this era, you’re in for a surprise.?

Sizing up your cyber risks?

Be it small, medium, or large-sized enterprises, cybercriminals are targeting organizations of all sizes across all industry sectors. The rapid digitization, hybrid working models, and virtual work meetings set to rise (and globally rule for the next decades) have provided cybercriminals with hotspots to make sophisticated attacks that are more frequent and dire in consequences.

Growing complexity makes companies more vulnerable if anything. One global company had spent over $100 million investigating an incident of a mega data breach as well as taking measures for direct remediation. On top of that, they lost multibillion-dollar in market capitalization as the company suffered the loss of investors’ confidence in their cyber-incidence response plan.?

No matter how big or small, organizations that fail to size up their cyber risks and prepare an incident response (IR) plan before time end up overspending from their budgets, and disrupt the bank of resources in a single day. In that perspective, cybersecurity and investment in its key products are financially burdensome.

Given that preparations beyond digital perimeters are implemented to strengthen cybersecurity response, companies can reap a high return on investment from these programs without spending millions on advanced assets or investigations.

However, for that to happen, we have to separate myths from facts and understand that security must be a shared responsibility across business units.?

Is your C-suite accessible to your cybersecurity team?

Cybersecurity teams have limited direct access to the C-suite of executives. In financial institutions, the senior-most cybersecurity personnel are at least 2 direct reports away as admitted by 32% of respondents. In other industries, 33% of respondents admitted the same limitation to the boardroom or executives of organizations they are working for.

Moreover, in another survey, it was revealed that cybersecurity teams use informal means to communicate with business leaders. To summarize the status of the defense system, around 23% of them use dashboards, whereas a whopping 44% use Emails, notes, or memos.

Unless your cybersecurity cannot be offered a seat at the executive table or considered a shared responsibility where transparency between business leaders and chief members is established, companies can continue to spend in the sector and remain as vulnerable as they were at square one.

With direct communications, cost transparency, and identification of business priorities, C-suite members and cybersecurity can together minimize spending and propel the organization to cut back on costs of upgrading assets at every stage of differentiated protection. In recent events, the key products in highest demand across India are perimeter security, gateway security, cloud security, and operation security, to name the major ones, indicating a micro-segmentation approach for prioritizing assets for the highest protection.

For instance, if a business is investing more focus on protecting exploration data and neglecting data on product cycles, unnecessary dollars are going to waste.

At Anzen, we provide customers with a full suite of far-reaching cybersecurity services that fall under each in-demand product category to help businesses protect their “crown jewel” and allocate their resources accordingly. This allows companies to utilize a tiered collection of security measures so that each corporate asset is defended with only the required focus without ineffectively using up budgets.?

Debunking myths about true costs and financial impact?

It’s long been overdue that certain myths around cybersecurity should be banished once and for all. Two of the biggest myths that relate to our topic are high costs, their financial impacts, and yearning for advanced technology.

To be stark clear, companies’ spending on cybersecurity programs does not, in any way, correlate with their level of protection. Any evidence that does reflect this phenomenon can be a true coincidence, the result of an inside skill, or optimization in another zone. Your total IT spending does not relate directly to the success of a company’s cybersecurity plan. Period.

In essence, companies that tend to overspend end up underperforming on digital resilience. Instead of a blanket approach where throwing money at the problem is supposedly a good way to alleviate the impact, especially in case of an intrusion, cybersecurity should be treated as an inherent part of business development. An ad hoc approach to funding cannot be an effective method especially if businesses and cybersecurity experts have not reached a shared understanding of costs and impact on funding their strategy.

Therefore, trust, strategy, and degree-wise relocation of resources to where they are needed significantly downsize the costs of cybersecurity and eliminate the option of ad hoc funding when data theft does occur.

Similarly, investing in high-end, advanced technologies cannot always be a smart decision if you thought all cyberattacks can be fought with these expensive tools. Although we do utilize cutting-edge technology to protect corporate assets, it should be kept in mind that not all companies are dealing with military-grade hackers, especially in India.

Research reveals that most cybercriminals are only financially motivated culprits who are using tactically simple tools and techniques to steal data. They might be evolving these attacks with time, but the right security methods, which need not be extremely powerful or highly advanced, can easily mitigate the threats.?

Final Thoughts

As such, conclusively, you should be focused on understanding how best cybersecurity tools can be used. Or perhaps, focused on finding proper moderators who come with the complete package, instead of spending your finances negligently elsewhere. The key, just like we offer at Anzen, is establishing and maintaining foolproof security protocols to complement these technologies, so that you can escape ineffective resource allocation and maximize your return on investments!

If you’re seeking cybersecurity professionals who know the ins and outs of making your organization non-hypothetically infallible when it comes to data protection, connect with us at Anzen to discuss things over.?