What are the costs and benefits of developing cybersecurity programs in business?
The biggest benefit is the survival of the business or company because if a breach were to occur a lot of domino effect events would happen. Starting with the data stolen, it could be from personal information of customers, employees, or other companies to develop modern technologies or projects to be made. Then, customers would lose trust, leaving the business with fewer profits. If the company does not have funds, the would-be unemployed personnel, and less productivity leading the company to a slow bankruptcy without a backup plan or countermeasures to avoid closure. Moreover, the side effects of a breach can still leave marks even after a business closes. For instance, an employee that relied from that business to provide can lead that employee to depression and finally having a human loss. That is why it is so important to budget for cybersecurity to mitigate financial, law issues, psychological, philosophical, political, and much more in this environment of the internet of things.
Then there are the costs. Starting by developing a secure system. Companies started hiring IT personnel around $2000 per full-time employe, spending 0.5% of the annual revenue, this was reported in 2020 and it will continue to increase at a faster pace. Secondly, a company needs to budget to keep the software update to remove vulnerabilities due to malicious hackers always wanting to find an error in the code, the median cost annually for maintenance in the software is about $50,000. Also, we must include an assessment of the system when in place to understand the weak points, create a security roadmap of the network and all devices connected to it. For this assessment around $1,500 – $6,000 for a network with 1-3 servers and $5,000 – $10,000 for a network with 5-8 servers. Finally, now days the most important thing is to keep the employees trained as many of the breaches result from inside. This cost in 2024 is about $0.42 and $4 monthly per employee for security awareness training as all costs in this post are based on the size of the company, employees, devices, type of negotiation with the providers including the length of contract.
Sources:
– https://www.provendata.com/blog/cyber-security-cost-expenses-fees/
– https://caniphish.com/blog/how-much-does-security-awareness-training-cost#costOfTraining