Best Practices for Budgeting for Cybersecurity

Budgeting for cybersecurity can be a challenge. You know the fallout of a cyber attack can be costly, but just how big of an attack or how likely such a threat is for your business may not be clear. Weighing the cost of cybersecurity and determining how much money to include within your IT security budget will help ensure that you aren’t overspending or putting your business at risk.

Use these tips to learn how to budget for cybersecurity and ensure that you’re making the right choice in protecting your business from imminent threats.

Make Sure Your Cybersecurity Plan Is Designed to Shift With Your Business, and Budget Accordingly

2020 brought new and expanded cybersecurity risks and threats for many businesses. With many employees working from home, businesses moved more operations to the web than ever before. In addition, ransomware attacks surged¹ as hackers took advantage of both increased reliance on the internet and the need to keep operations moving forward, perhaps prompting more businesses to pay ransoms to get back online faster.

Businesses also increased their use of third party vendors, with each new vendor opening up a new bag of security concerns. Each time you bring on a vendor, new risks may present themselves through the vendor’s network, software, or as a direct result of communications with their team members who may not follow the same security protocols as your own.

The right cybersecurity plan will evolve and adapt to your business as you implement changes like moving to remote work or onboarding new vendors. Budgeting for high quality managed cybersecurity solutions will help you stay protected as industry or worldwide threats and changes affect your business.

Develop a Process for Measuring ROI

It’s equally important to frequently measure the return on investment (ROI) from your program and make adjustments that will increase the value and impact those investments have on your business.

Measuring ROI on cybersecurity investments can be difficult. When you’re deciding whether a new product was a success, you track sales. When you’re determining the success of a new service, you might measure success based on service level attainment, or client testimonials, or feedback. But if your cybersecurity measures are effective, your executives might not notice because threats are either avoided entirely or swiftly dealt with.

To determine the value of cybersecurity investments, you might attempt to quantify how many security events were deflected (identified as false positives) and what the time savings impact was to the organization. Some organizations find it easier to examine a few of the threats that their security team identified as real and then qualify the activities it took to investigate, respond to, and remediate the threats.  Then, using third-party research from various groups that report the averages of downtime or how much a data breach might cost, you can estimate what the threats of a data breach would have cost² your business. Consider both direct losses – such as losing client data – as well as secondary losses such as downtime for your employees or fines and penalties from regulators. These losses can be tough to estimate, and you may not be able to identify the level of threat that each potential attack could present; however, this will help give you an idea of how the cost of cybersecurity measures up against the potential cost of not investing.

Budgeting for Cybersecurity With Expert Help

The cost of implementing cybersecurity may outweigh the actual or perceived risk if you forgo protection. That said, the loss of your organization’s brand reputation, customer revenue, vendors, partners, credit rating, and employees that follow a data breach is often the death blow for many companies that experience a significant data breach. If you would like input on how to evolve your cybersecurity program, how to improve your cybersecurity defenses, and how to proactively secure your organization without breaking the bank, Vertek can help. We can also show you how to determine if your current IT security budget is creating a maximum return on investment. Schedule a confidential consultation with a cybersecurity expert from Vertek today.

1. https://www.govtech.com/blogs/lohrmann-on-cybersecurity/2020-the-year-the-covid-19-crisis-brought-a-cyber-pandemic.html 
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/05/09/yes-virginia-you-can-calculate-roi-for-cybersecurity-budgets/?sh=709bdee3ad42