The growing number of cybersecurity attacks targeting businesses coupled with increasing complexity is making life difficult for cybersecurity operations. Businesses must invest in expensive cybersecurity tools and hardware such as HOSTNOC dedicated severs. They must rely on a cybersecurity framework that is difficult to build and maintain.
According to research conducted by Ponemon Institute, enterprises spend $2.86 million every year on internal security operations centers. Despite this, only 51% of respondents consider their security operation center highly effective when it comes to detecting and responding to cybersecurity attacks.
How can you keep the cybersecurity operations cost down in such a situation? In this article, you will learn about five effective ways to minimize the cost of cybersecurity operations without compromising on security and privacy by .
Cybersecurity Budget During COVID-19
COVID-19 has impacted every industry you can think of and cybersecurity is not an exception. According to a report, 23% of CIOs said that their budget remains frozen for more than two months while 49% saw a decline during the same period. Coronavirus has also led to the emergence of new cybersecurity challenges such as securing remote workers, preventing them from becoming a target of phishing attacks and other forms of cybersecurity attacks.
Since a major chunk of your cybersecurity operations is dedicated to staffing, most businesses will look to cut cybersecurity jobs to keep labor costs down. Their main objective would be to achieve more with fewer resources. This will put more pressure on cybersecurity professionals who are already subject to stress and employee burnout.
Another downside of downsizing is that it could negatively impact your cybersecurity operation program and reduce its effectiveness. That is why Mark Orlando, co-founder of Bionic cyber advises businesses,” Cutting staff should be the absolute last resort.”
On average businesses spend seven to eight months training a new hire. Firing an employee after training them for months is not a wise decision. Additionally, it can also impact team collaboration and cohesion as the new employee might take a longer time to adjust. So how can businesses reduce the cost of cybersecurity operations without laying off employees or compromising on security?
5 Ways to Reduce Cybersecurity Operation Cost
Here are five ways to keep your cybersecurity operation cost low.
- Get Rid of Redundant Tools
Did you know how many security technologies and solutions does an enterprise use? 45. Yes, you read that right. What is more interesting is that studies show the more tools an enterprise uses the less effective they are at detecting and responding to cybersecurity incidents as compared to enterprises with fewer tools. Why? Because more tools add to the complexity, creating compatibility issues that affect interoperability while forcing employees to get themselves acquainted with all these tools through training and certification.
Analyze all the cybersecurity tools your web design agency business uses and see if there are any tools with overlapping and similar capabilities. If there are any, it is better to get rid of these tools as they can improve cybersecurity resilience and reduce the complexity and incompatibility issues. Moreover, it will also make it easier for your cybersecurity team to manage and administer the cybersecurity tools. The same goes for security information and event management solution, threat intelligence tools.
- Choose a Single Vendor Solution
Another great way to save money on cybersecurity tools is to buy from a single vendor and choose its comprehensive suites. Instead of buying separate tools for everything, you should get a suit that packs multiple tools. When you select a single vendor suite, your cybersecurity analysts do not have to monitor multiple dashboards simultaneously or get training and certification for all these tools. This can save a lot of time and resources, which will eventually translate into cost savings in your cybersecurity budget.
- Automate Cybersecurity Task Logically
Choose a cybersecurity solution that can streamline workflows and automate mundane tasks. This way, your cybersecurity team does not have to waste their time and energy on repetitive tasks and can focus on more critical tasks. Unfortunately, not all solutions are the same. Some might demand more resources such as time and labor for implementation such as security orchestration automation and response.
Start off by automating smaller and specific tasks as they are far easier to automate than move on to the more sophisticated tasks. This will keep you motivated and help you convince board members and other stakeholders by showing them the real value of automation. Ensure the tool you choose can integrate with existing data sources.
Maintain Log in the Cloud
Due to COVID-19, most teams are working remotely. This forces you to direct all network data sources to a centralized location so your remote employees can easily access it. You might not have noticed it but your log management strategy can impact your cybersecurity budget, so it is a great time to review your log management strategy.
It is better to invest in a cloud-based security information and event management solution system for log management. Users can easily configure these cloud-based solutions to ingest logs from popular cloud service providers. More importantly, it also makes it easy to collect and share data with third-party service providers.
- Outsource
Despite the coronavirus and its impact on the global economy, security services especially managed security services have grown in popularity. Even though the service quality and customer satisfaction vary drastically from a vendor to vendor, managed service providers are becoming more and more popular.
In most cases, managed security service providers act as an alerting engine but it can deliver too many false positives, which makes them feel less valuable to your internal cybersecurity operation program. If you want to outsource, choose a vendor who has the relevant industry experience and follows the same business model as you do. Recruiting cybersecurity professionals and training them can be costly but you can save money by outsourcing.
How do you reduce the cost of your cybersecurity operations? Let us know in the comments section below.