It can be difficult to justify spending on cybersecurity, but can you afford not to?
Ultimately, cost will always be a major obstacle when it comes to proposing spending on cybersecurity, particularly beyond your standard antivirus.
Yes you’re spending money today, but if you’re unlucky enough to fall victim to one of the millions (if not billions) of forms of malware in the wild, you’re targeted by cybercriminals, or you suffer the theft or loss of company devices, you won’t just be measuring the cost in pound sterling.
There are three major factors to consider the cost of: reputation, data and intellectual property (IP) loss, as well as fines and other financial loss.
Reputation. The damage that can be caused by being the victim of a hack, or even just suffering from some downtime in the age of streaming and instant access to information, is substantial. The reputational damage that can be caused by headlines like “Company loses the financial information of thousands of customers”, is considerably worse.
Data and IP. Company data and IP are always closely guarded secrets that are worth more than their weight in gold. If that data isn’t encrypted, it is vulnerable. Particularly if you’re moving said data over a network, or on removable media.
Fines and Finances. Of course both of the above points will have a financial effect on a company but fines are a major factor. With the introduction of the GDPR, the ICO is now able to issues fines up to 20 million Euros or 4% of annual turnover to companies who are found not to have complied with data protection regulations.
Encryption is the surefire way to protect your highly valuable data, limit the damage to your reputation after a breach, and is the only technology mentioned by name in the GDPR as an “appropriate technical measure”.
So the question shouldn’t be whether your company can spend the time and resources to implement encryption, but can you afford not to?
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