Cost of Cybercrime:  Addressing Tight Budgets and an increasing Skills Gap

2023 will be another challenging year for organizations as cyberthreats continue to dominate headlines. On top of a more complex threat landscape, organizations are now having to navigate uncertainties around budget restrictions as the c-suite focuses on cutting what they perceive as non-essential costs.

The global cost of cybercrime is expected to surge in the next five years, rising from $8.44 trillion in 2022 to $23.84 trillion by 2027. With cyberthreats forecast to cause greater damage to both data and revenues, it’s exceptionally important when leadership thinks about cybersecurity budgets, they take the time to carefully analyze and understand what they are protecting from a business perspective.

Organizations will be looking to do more with less in 2023 and budgets are being put under the microscope as economic uncertainty sweeps through every sector. As cyberattacks continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, organizations need to consolidate their prevention and detection technologies whilst utilizing their security operations center (SOC) team to stay ahead of emerging threats.

Investment vs Inflation

Threats will inevitably continue to evolve as organizations balance international geopolitical circumstances with internal cutbacks. Cybercriminals are taking this turbulence as an opportunity to level up their attacks. This is driving the need for organizations to double down on their security defenses with the most effective solutions for fighting modern threats.

To add to this challenge, organizations are faced with needing to not only invest in cybersecurity tools, but also in security teams. With the increasing skills gap, threat actors are launching opportunistic attacks whilst organizations attempt to widen their talent pools.

In times of increased vulnerability, it is essential that organizations continue to invest in cybersecurity. Cutting corners when it comes to cybersecurity investment decisions leaves data and IT systems open to attack, which ultimately will cost organizations more in the event of a breach.

 All organizations must be strategic with their security spending. This involves deploying solutions that encompass consolidated and comprehensive threat detection and mitigation capabilities.

A Modern Approach for Fighting Modern Threats

In 2023, business leaders cannot afford to falter in their cybersecurity investments. To stay ahead and get the best value from their security spending, they need to choose security tools that can work together, analyze all of their data, automate and optimize manual processes, and detect threats in real time.

Understanding Your Top Threats – It can be hard to know where to invest your budget if you’re uncertain of where your biggest weaknesses lie. The first step to understanding which areas need to be prioritized is to identify the major gaps in your security strategy. By conducting a cyber risk assessment, security teams can understand what resources they need to be focusing on to achieve an efficient defense strategy.

Once this is established, organizations can focus on a “risk optimization” process to make cybersecurity investments that are guided by business outcomes. Cyber risk optimization is understanding threats, priorities, and business investments to design a cyber strategy that takes on the correct amount of risk. 

Consolidating Cyber Tools – With network data increasing all the time, chief information security officers (CISOs) need to address how they can protect critical assets without blowing the budget.

CISOs are racking up huge costs on security products they don’t use – or investing in tools that fail to protect their organizations against modern cyber threats.

By deploying a security information and event management (SIEM) platform, security teams can combine data from different analysis tools and identify potential threats and vulnerabilities before they cause any disruption or data loss. SIEM solutions provide security teams with a consolidated platform that gives a real-time holistic view of security issues across the corporate network.

Deploying consolidated capabilities within a unified platform helps organizations reduce costs and improve the efficiency of their investigations.

Accessing Automation – Harnessing automated threat detection capabilities enables organizations to fight threats faster. This means that highly paid (and difficult to find and retain) security analysts aren’t wasting their time sorting through thousands of alerts every day. Instead, their time is used to efficiently investigate actual threats to the IT system. This ensures organizations are maximizing the use of their security budget by allowing analysts to focus on high-level threat hunting activities.

Automated security systems allow security teams to address the cybersecurity skills gap. Automated tools determine which workloads within the company can be handled by artificial intelligence (AI) and, prioritize those that require human analysis.

Budgeting for the Future

Uncertain economic times represent an opportunity for organizations to reevaluate their overall cybersecurity posture, processes, and technology areas.

Cybersecurity budgets need to be allocated in a way that allows businesses to operate without putting themselves at risk of falling victim to an attack. Leadership teams need to ensure their costs are focused on their most critical areas whilst ensuring they have comprehensive defenses in place that can minimize the chances of a breach and maximize their security investments.