What are the costs and benefits of developing cybersecurity programs in business?

Developing a cybersecurity program for your business is one of the most important things you can do. 68 percent of small business have incurred at least one cyberattack, protecting against these are crucial to the security of a company’s data and money.  However, not all losses can be attributed to an attack, human error can often lead to data leaks and end up costing the company. For this reason, it is important to have an incident response plan developed which, depending on the size of the company, may require hiring a response team to assist in recovery.

According to IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report”, the average cost of a company to a data breach in 2019 was $392,000. Cyberattacks cost businesses $5,000 in lost business opportunities and $23,000 in downtime in addition to professional services. This is not to mention how much confidence you could lose in your already established customer base. Upon review of the most popular antivirus, a business can expect to pay on average $30 for coverage on 5-10 devices. Does your business want firewall protection? A business can expect to pay between $5-8$ per user per month for endpoint detection and $9-$18 per server per month. Of course, the prices go up depending on how much protection a company wants, there is no “one size fits all”. On average a company can expect to spend about 10% of their annual IT budget on cybersecurity.

So what happens if a company has purchased its protection but for some reason, whether it be cyber attack induced, user error, or a physical equipment issue, data is still lost? This is where the incident response plan will kick in. If your cyber security plan already included backups and recovery costs, then your incident response shouldn’t be costly. However, if your company ends up needing to hire an incident response firm to assist in recovery efforts, costs range between 30k and 150k.

Its probably looking, based on this reading, that the benefits are good but the costs seem high, and you’d be right. However, the costs aren’t as high as the $3.9 million that your company could lose to a data breach!

Ref: https://www.thales-ld.com/the-costs-of-developing-a-cybersecurity-program-for-your-business/

https:// (www) security.org/antivirus/cost/#:~:text=Antivirus%20software%20costs%20anywhere%20from,costs%20around%20%24100%20a%20year.

https:// (www) ibm.com/reports/data-breach

https:// (www) marconet.com/blog/cyber-incident-response#:~:text=1.,a%20loss%20you’re%20facing