How to Effectively Plan Your Cybersecurity Budget
Wondering how much you should be spending on your cybersecurity practices? How much is too much? How much is too little? Cybersecurity investments and spending simply depend on the factors that contribute to your business’s needs. Many factors go into the building of an annual budget and deciding what to prioritize for businesses. It can be difficult to determine what your business should put at the top of its spending list.
One thing is for certain: implementing security best practices is more important than ever for your business. Proper cybersecurity practice and protocols can save your business from a data breach that results in loss of time, data, money, and often even the trust of clients and customers.
Why You Should Prioritize Cybersecurity in Your Budget
Cybersecurity should be a top priority of every business - small, large, or somewhere in between. No matter the size or the industry, businesses need to have a serious focus on cybersecurity to prevent breaches. Today, small businesses especially need to put cybersecurity practices in place as they are the target of about half of all cyberattacks.
The need for security is here to stay and is only increasing as technology continues to innovate. Data breaches occur daily exposing sensitive personal and business information. It is far less expensive to prevent cyber breaches than to recover damages when they occur.
What is the Cost of a Data Breach?
The United States ranked number one for the most expensive data breach country in the world in IBM and Ponemon Institute’s annual Cost of a Data Breach report for 2019. The report noted that the average total cost of a data breach in the United States is $8.64 million. For comparison, the global average was $3.86 million. The most expensive industry for data breaches in the US was the healthcare industry.
Data breaches cost your company so much more than just money. The average time to identify and contain a breach is 280 days. Cybercriminals often have access to your confidential data for extended periods of time and can either expose, encrypt, or erase your data. The expense of downtime and lost data can be exponential in terms of time, money, trust from customers, and ultimately lost business.
What does a Cybersecurity Budget Look Like?
Large financial services firms spend 6% to 14% of their IT budgets on cybersecurity. This is approximately 0.2% to 0.9% of company revenue, according to a study by Deloitte. There is no one-size-fits-all plan for budgeting for cybersecurity, but this can serve as a starting point when looking at your own budget and IT plan. If your company has a CISO, much of this decision will fall under his or her authority.
When prioritizing cybersecurity to protect your business from a breach, it is important to set specific goals and improvements since cybersecurity is so broad. Some topics to home in on when budgeting for cybersecurity in any business are:
- Risk assessment
- Education and employee training programs
- Back-ups
- Regular scanning and testing
- Secure network and websites
Taking a look at each of these for your cybersecurity budget can be beneficial to your company and can help plan what you are going to prioritize within your budget. After a risk assessment, you can decide how much cybersecurity investment your company needs to be secure. You might need to invest more or less depending on your risk.
ThreatAdvice by NXTsoft provides best-in-industry, affordable cybersecurity solutions. ThreatAdvice Educate trains and monitors employees on cybersecurity basics to protect your company at its front line. ThreatAdvice vCISO is a comprehensive, cost-effective solution that provides your company with a virtual Chief Information Security Officer to monitor your data and security. Adding ThreatAdvice to your cybersecurity budget is easy, affordable, and effective.