Cybersecurity is no doubt topping your list of priorities as a business owner. There is arguably not a greater danger to your business than the possibility of a cyberattack. It may leave your business-critical data either compromised or destroyed. However, as a business owner, you may face a high cybersecurity cost, either by being a victim of an attack or the investment required to establish cybersecurity defenses against attacks.
In 2020 cybersecurity costs businesses more than ever before! However, the risks to your business for not implementing effective cybersecurity are far too grave to ignore.
Why is cybersecurity so costly? What is included in a cybersecurity budget? Does effective cybersecurity have to be expensive and complicated? We will look at how Spinbackup’s cybersecurity solution is providing not only an extremely easy and powerful cybersecurity solution but one that is cost-effective.
Table of Contents
What is the high Cost of a Cybersecurity Attack?
As a business owner, the costs of today’s cybersecurity threats are expensive either getting attacked or defending against an attack. Let’s take for example getting attacked due to a cybersecurity breach. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report presents very compelling cybersecurity statistics including the following:
Global Data Breach Costs Statistics
- $3.92 million average total costs of a data breach
- The average size of a data breach – 25,575 records
- Cost per lost record $150
United States Data Breach Costs
- $8.19 million average total costs of a data breach
- The average size of a data breach – 25,575 records
- Cost per lost record $242
When you look at these cyber security statistics, it is eye-opening to see the financial implications of being attacked and the risks to your business from a fiscal perspective. Most of the total costs are made up of damaged brand reputation, legal fees, and even fines.
The alarming trend with cybersecurity and data breaches is they are going up in cost and generally are becoming more severe in their scope and the data that is involved. Attackers are making use of malicious tools such as ransomware in a more strategic way to target certain industries, businesses, and sectors. No one is immune to these kinds of attacks, including small and mid-sized businesses.
Read also: The Cost of Data Breach: Calculate the ROI of Backup
How Much Does Cybersecurity Cost?
While cybersecurity attacks are certainly expensive as shown, defending against cybersecurity attacks can also be costly for your business. Why is this? It is proving to be an extremely difficult job to keep up with all the vulnerabilities that are surfacing across the board.
This requires time, money, and more headcount to keep up with the daily cybersecurity tasks required to stay ahead of the curve so to speak. So, how much do companies spend on cybersecurity?
Most businesses today do not have the skillset, expertise, or resources to write their own cybersecurity software. Instead, most businesses will purchase solutions that handle such things as:
- Next-generation firewall capabilities
- Endpoint detection and response
- Mobile device management
- Security information and event management
- Cloud security
Each of these various areas of expertise with software solutions can amount to a significant investment for your business from a financial perspective. As the costs of cybersecurity threats go up, so do the costs and investments of software solutions that provide the ability to protect your business against the risks and vulnerabilities that are discovered in these various areas.
The costs of effective cybersecurity can be significant. An example is found in the report “Pursuing Cybersecurity Maturity at Financial Institutions” by Deloitte and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center. In this report, it is revealed that banks, insurance companies, investment managers, and other financial services companies spend between 6% and 14% of their annual information technology budget on cybersecurity, for an average of 10%. This equals roughly 0.2% to 0.9% of company revenue, or between $1,300 to $3,000 on cybersecurity per full-time or equivalent employee.
As you look at the significant spending involved with cybersecurity budgets today, what makes up the recommended cybersecurity budget for effective coverage of today’s threats?
What Makes up a Cybersecurity Budget?
When looking at the cybersecurity budget spend, what makes up the cybersecurity budget of businesses today? SANS Institute published a document called “IT Security Spending Trends” that details some of the trends in spending as related to IT security. Below is a table found in this document that helps to break down spending trends among those who were surveyed and how their budgets were allocated.
The big trends as far as this study was concerned pointed to protection and prevention, detection and response, and compliance as the three big spendings among those surveyed.
| Operational Areas that Account for Security Spending | |
| Operational Area | % Response |
| Protection and Prevention | 72.40% |
| Detection and response | 62.8% |
| Compliance and audit (including legal) | 58.60% |
| Risk reduction | 49.70% |
| End-user training and awareness | 45.50% |
| Governance/Policies | 43.40% |
| Staff training and certification | 39.30% |
| Security program or project management | 38.60% |
| Design/Development | 34.50% |
| Discovery and forensics | 31.70% |
| Other | 2.10% |
Cloud Security More Important Than Ever
Your business may be among many that are moving business-critical data to the cloud. Cloud environments can add additional complexity to your security posture since for many, it can be uncharted territory. The traditional tools that are geared for security on-premises are often not designed to simply apply them to the cloud.
Here is one of the cyber security facts: it is now needed in the cloud more than ever. In the 2019 Vulnerability and Threat Trends Report from Skybox Security, Cloud security was center stage with insecurities and misconfigurations being considerable threat vectors for cloud environments.
On-premises environments are often well-understood and your business likely has a good handle on what measures need to be taken for on-premises security. However, with cloud environments, and even with Software-as-a-Service environments, there can be confusion regarding how to maintain a particular level of security.
Cloud environments pose challenges to cybersecurity objectives
Another key finding in the Skybox report is the risk posed by third-party vendors. You want to make sure you know your third-party vendors and what data security protocols they themselves enforce. Additionally, you need to have the ability to use technology to disallow third-party vendors who post a risk to your organization.
Another key for security with cloud environments, especially with SaaS environments like Office 365 and Google G Suite, is understanding who has access to your data and what data they have access to. With public cloud environments and SaaS environments as mentioned, internal users can potentially share business-critical or sensitive data outside the organization with external contacts.
Understanding which data may be shared with outside contacts is a crucial part of securing your data. Using native tools included in SaaS environments can lack the visibility and controls needed to secure your data. You want to make sure your data in the cloud is secured from data leaks as the consequences of a data leak can be disastrous as shown in hacking statistics such as found in the Cost of Data Breach report from IBM.
All of these complex issues can not only increase the complexity of your overall cybersecurity stance but it certainly drives up the cost of cybersecurity in general due to inefficient processes, confusion on best practices, and buying into cybersecurity tools that may not serve your needs.
However, cybersecurity need not be complicated or expensive. Spinbackup provides a next-generation approach to cybersecurity in the cloud for your G Suite and Office 365 environments that provides protection and prevention, detection and response, compliance and audit, as well as disaster recovery all in one solution. Let’s see how.
Cost-Effective Cloud Cybersecurity with Spinbackup
Spinbackup provides one of the most powerful combinations of cybersecurity and data protection that you will find on the market today to provide protection for your vital business-critical assets that are stored in Google G Suite or Office 365 environments. It has been described as a “cybersecurity expert” working for your business.
Keying in on the cybersecurity capabilities of the solution, there are a number of great benefits included in the Spinbackup cybersecurity suite. What are some of those features? Spinbackup includes the following cybersecurity protection features for your cloud SaaS environment:
- Ransomware Protection
- Insider Threat Protection
- Risky Third-party Apps Protection
- Abnormal Logins and Brute Force Attack Protection
- Data Sharing Visibility
- User Behavior Control
- Automated Alerting and Automated Suspension
- Security Policies
Let’s highlight a few of these features a bit more in-depth.
Ransomware Protection
Ransomware statistics are shocking: now, it is one of the biggest concerns among IT professionals and business leaders alike. You may have those same concerns. Even in cloud environments, ransomware has proven to be able to infiltrate such resources as cloud email.
Spinbackup provides automated ransomware protection. As soon as a ransomware attack is detected, it is removed and any resources that were affected are automatically restored.
Insider Threat Protection
Insider threats can prove to be some of the most dangerous. Spinbackup uses machine learning algorithms to quickly identify abnormal behavior. This includes abnormal downloads, brute-force attacks, abnormal logins, and the transmissions of credit card numbers.
Risky Third-Party Apps Protection
As mentioned in the Skybox vulnerability report, knowing and controlling third-party vendors is an extremely important part of security, including in the cloud. Cloud environments such as G Suite and Office 365 have “app marketplaces” that allow the integration of third-party software solutions into your public cloud SaaS environments. Spinbackup allows both whitelisting and blacklisting of third-party apps that can be installed in your SaaS environments. You can also be notified if a third-party app starts showing suspicious behavior.
Abnormal Logins and Brute Force Attack Protection
Protecting against abnormal logins from suspicious regions or networks as well as brute force attacks is an important part of cybersecurity. Spinbackup provides protection against both types of attacks. Abnormal logins and brute force attacks are blocked and administrators are notified.
Data Sharing Visibility
Data that is inadvertently or intentionally shared outside your cloud environment can be dangerous. Spinbackup provides visibility to this data and also allows administrators to quickly block data sharing.
User Behavior Control
Spinbackup is like a virtual security professional that works for you 24x7x365. It is able to detect anomalies in user behavior at any time of day or night and alert you to the behavior. This allows you to have confidence in the security of your cloud platform, knowing it is protected.
Automatic Alerting and Automated Suspension
With Spinbackup you get immediate alerts to inform you of a potential data breach as well as daily incident reports. Additionally, Spinbackup performs automated suspensions such as revoking access to a risky third-party app or a user with abnormal behavior. If a user tries to migrate data in an unauthorized way between cloud environments this is suspended as well.
Spinbackup security alerts give visibility to events in your cloud environment
Security Policies
With G Suite, Spinbackup allows you to create policies for actioning security events and automating security processes for Apps, Data, and Domain-related event types. This allows you to have granular control over the scope of rules, exceptions, and notification settings across your organization.
Reduce Cybersecurity Cost in 2022 with Spinbackup
We have seen the enormous costs associated both with data breaches as well as the costs of protecting your business with cybersecurity defenses with traditional budgets. What is the cost of cybersecurity features and capabilities with Spinbackup protecting your cloud?
- $9 user/month – including data protection
Cybersecurity has never been more challenging and important than it is today. The costs of a data breach as well as protecting against data breach are both rising exponentially.
However, high cybersecurity pricing do not have to be the standard for your business. By using Spinbackup, you can have a modern, machine learning-enabled cybersecurity solution, protecting your cloud environment that costs $9 user/month.
Don’t miss out: Types of Cyber Security Threats in 2020 and How to Prevent Them
