Spoiler alert: The answer is yes. But not in the way you might expect.
Unless you live in an enchanted land where mermaids feed you healthy beer for breakfast, your security budget has probably shrunk recently. The good news is that this can be good news because determining with ruthless clarity the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of your cybersecurity program will help you take deliberate steps to improve it with an efficient spend.
The importance of cybersecurity during a recession
Threats from cybercriminals don’t stop just because of economic instability. In fact, as we look back at our last global recession in 2009, a recession creates more cybercriminals who then go on to perform even more cyber attacks on enterprises. Ensuring a strong cybersecurity posture during these times is essential to prevent the potential risk and severity of a breach, and to maintain compliance across your entire cyber ecosystem.
3 Ways to ensure your cybersecurity program is recession-proof
Even in times of economic uncertainty, strengthening your organization’s security enables business growth by increasing trust with partners and customers, and greatly minimizing the risk of a costly cyberattack.
To drive these results:
1. Quantify Risk and ROI
Telling your stakeholders, “I’ve deployed an endpoint detection system across IP range 121.1.1.3/24” will do little beyond flummoxing them. Not because they’re not as smart as you. They’re super smart. It’s because the info needs to be delivered and understood in terms of business outcomes. So it’s best to go with something more like, “Given a 38% risk of data breach that would cost our organization $9.9 million, I recommend spending $275,000 on a software product that will reduce that risk tenfold.”
SecurityScorecard’s commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Calculator allows you to calculate potential ROI on your security solutions and plans.
2. Inventory Your Cyber Stack
The average security team uses 47+ different products, but 53% of enterprises don’t know if their security tools work.
Make sure you have a layered cybersecurity stack (defense in depth is good), but don’t have too many duplicative solutions, as that wastes resources. It’s the cyber equivalent of wearing a belt and suspenders – with overalls on top!
Take a close look at your enterprise’s cyber solutions to assess whether they collectively help your pants stay up while maintaining ease of movement, so to speak. Integrate these solutions into a single pane of glass, and ensure that this gives you actionable insights into the risks posed by your entire business ecosystem (third- and fourth-party vendors and business partners).
3. Optimize and automate your business ecosystem risk management program
The security posture of your organization is never just your security posture. In this hyper-connected, six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon cloud ecosystem that we all operate in, it’s a combination of your own, your vendors’, their vendors’, and so on. The cyber health of your ecosystem is critical for growing trust and integrity with your clientbase, maintaining business continuity, and reducing the probability of a breach on your enterprise’s network.
Ensure recession-proof cybersecurity with SecurityScorecard
An automated solution that enables continuous monitoring will allow you to identify all of your third- and fourth-party vendors (it’s more complicated than it sounds), analyze each of them, and prioritize them based on risk.
These tactics, plus a drumbeat of basic cyber hygiene (MFA, security awareness, and password policies), will help you defend your business and enable its growth.
For more actionable insights on belt and suspender best practices strengthening your cyber posture when budgets are under scrutiny, download our ebook, 5 Ways to Secure Your Organization in Turbulent Times or request a demo to learn more.
About SecurityScorecard
SecurityScorecard is the global leader in cybersecurity ratings and the only service with millions of organizations continuously rated. Thousands of organizations leverage our patented rating technology for self-monitoring, business ecosystem risk management (aka third-party risk management), board reporting, and cyber insurance underwriting. But we don’t stop there. Through a customer-centric, solution-based commitment to our partners, we are transforming the digital landscape, building a path toward cyber resilience.