Investing in Data Security

Companies and executives who want to ensure maximum cyber safety for their organization should pay attention to Cisco’s recently published study.  According to their Data Privacy Benchmark Study 2020, those who invest in data privacy find it worth their while, with seven of 10 seeing an average return of 270%.

What this equates to is better effectiveness at preventing breaches and mitigating the damage when one occurs, both financially and temporally.  Striving merely for base-level compliance, for example just checking the boxes to avoid fines, is a recipe for failure.  Industry standards and laws are constantly changing.  Just because you may meet certain qualifications at one point, doesn’t mean you will for long.  This means more and more companies are coming to see data security as wise, advantageous investments.  After all, a primary concern people have is how their data is being guarded.  Consumer trust is valuable.  From a business perspective, it has become critical to ensure everything is in order.

In the EU, with GDPR in effect, this is clear from the numbers.  Noncompliance with the new regulations resulted in an average of 212,000 files compromised during a data breach, versus 79,000 from GDPR-compliant entities.  And with 82% of companies having experienced a breach in 2019, I’d say every file counts.

This mindset of proactive investment will prove especially relevant as cyber criminals continue to expand their efforts, targeting companies through an increasing variety of avenues.  Even other organizations, like third-party business partners, are access points.  What results can be substantial business disruption—according to a CrowdStrike survey of 2019 incidents, this may even be the main objective and impact.  This disruption, data theft, and any financial damages are more than enough to bog a company down in trying to rectify and repair the harm that’s been done.  If legacy software, which becomes trickier to maintain over time, is still in play, the situation becomes even riskier.  It is often harder to detect intruders when your security is outdated; CrowdStrike discovered that this has been a problem especially with state-sponsored hackers.  Sometimes, they can even remain hidden up to three years.

This type of hacking is on the rise of late, and the theft of intellectual property and highly sensitive personal data has been a consequence.

So, whether the driving motivation is protecting your customers’ data, maintaining the flow of business operations, or both, making solid investments in cybersecurity is crucial for firms in this day and age.