When you think about intelligent investments, you may picture real estate, stocks or the latest tech startups. However, there’s a different kind of investment that pays both in the immediate and the long-term: cybersecurity. This investment is crucial to protect businesses from expensive cyberattacks, and it helps them avoid costly fines and losing the trust of their customers.
As digital transformation transforms business operations, companies are creating data, manipulating and storing an ever-growing amount of data which must be effectively managed across complex computing environments. These environments include cloud data centres, enterprise data centres, and a range of connected devices, such as Internet of Things sensors and robotics. This added complexity creates a larger attack surface which makes it difficult to safeguard critical information from loss or compromise.
In addition to the financial costs of data breaches, they can also harm a company’s reputation and result in long-term sales losses. A recent study has revealed that the average cost of a data breach is $4 million, which is hard for any organization to absorb. In addition, regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and the General Data Protection Regulation impose steep fines on companies that fail to meet the strict security requirements.
In today’s world of competitiveness, a strong cybersecurity posture is key to growth. A penny of prevention is worth a pound cure, and it’s far more economical to invest in preventative measures rather than the cost of cleaning up and recovering after an incident. With the right tools and technologies, companies can ensure their information is secure while in transit, at rest and in the middle by implementing encryption and paying attention to the human firewall and conducting regular deep checks.