Guide to Cybersecurity Budget Before and After a Security Breach
With anecdotes and national news regularly featuring news about cyber incidents on companies of all sizes, small and medium entities are now including cybersecurity in their budgets. While it’s now more critical than ever to implement effective cybersecurity policies, you must understand the common risks and whether your company is doing enough to stay protected.
Like most core functions, business cybersecurity usually requires substantial monetary investment; hence must be part of your budget. Moreover, the need for secure networks and systems isn’t ending anytime soon. In fact, it’s become even more relevant to businesses of all sizes. As such, you must make it a financial priority this year and beyond.
So why do you need a cybersecurity budget? And what are the most important considerations before and after a cybersecurity incident? This piece has all you need to know.
Reasons to Budget for Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity affects both small and established corporate entities, and small organizations face lots of hurdles. First, almost 50% of these incidents target small entities. Furthermore, companies in this group usually have limited budgets dedicated to their data and system security. As such, they have more to lose in a cyber-incident.
So why should you have a comprehensive cybersecurity budget before and after a cybersecurity incident? Here are the primary reasons:
- Vendor requirements – Vendor requirements like third-party risk assessments are gaining prominence across the board and are a major contractual consideration component.
- Stakeholder requirement – You can create a detailed budget for your business to address pressure from the company’s board of directors and other stakeholders demanding prioritization and deployment of cybersecurity hygiene practices.
- Defining goals – Considering the broad scope of cybersecurity, creating a budget will help you determine specific objectives and improvements.
- Compliance – Cybersecurity compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR, alongside state and national regulations, require companies to maintain cybersecurity standards, and one of them is creating a budget.
- Improved awareness – A cybersecurity budget must include cybersecurity training to keep staff aware of different forms of cyberattacks.
- Vulnerability identification – Cybersecurity budgeting helps with the identification and management of website and network vulnerabilities.
- To stay competitive – An all-encompassing cybersecurity budget gives you a competitive advantage for large contracts and projects.
So what are the key considerations when budgeting for cybersecurity before or after an incident? Read on to find out.
Key Considerations When Budgeting for Cybersecurity
Here, your budget is mainly centered on preventative measures that limit the likelihood of cyber incidents and protect you from the heavy burden of risk mitigation and recovery. Here are the critical budgetary items that you must pay attention to before a cybersecurity attack:
Implementation of A Risk Management Framework
If your organization leverages risk management frameworks like ISO 27001 or the NIST framework, you must budget for reliable consultation service for apt guidance on deploying a cybersecurity framework that satisfies the relevant controls. However, even without such frameworks, it’s still essential to set aside a budget for solving root problems.
Third-Party Cybersecurity
Vendors and third parties can be a weak link in your cybersecurity chain, and cybercriminals are well aware. As such, you must allocate a segment of your budget to address third-party risk management. You must also be mindful of your vendors’ ongoing cybersecurity posture before partnering with them.
Several compliance regulations require companies to allocate a budget for security. For instance, HIPAA regulations bind healthcare providers, and these define the data security and privacy requirements for protecting patients’ personal data and medical records. Cybersecurity budgets help you avoid the potential implications and fines.
Staff Training
Unaware employees can be a threat to your overall cybersecurity posture. Advanced threats like phishing target unsuspecting employees; hence all teams must be adequately educated on the risks. The budgetary allocation for staff training isn’t substantial, but you’ll be able to avoid common threats that leverage worker ignorance.
Endpoint Security
Your company personnel connect to your network via endpoints like mobile devices, desktops, and laptops, which contain sensitive data. So you can easily tell the importance of endpoint security in your budget. You must know how endpoints are used and if and when they’ve been compromised. When setting a budget, consider the most valuable data.
Cyber Insurance
The final item in this list is also vital to your overall system and data security. Notably, reducing your cybersecurity risk involves mitigating, downsizing, or transferring the risk. All these items are focused on eliminating and reducing the impact of cyber incidents, but budgeting for cyber insurance can be an excellent way to transfer risk.
Budgeting After a Cyberattack
When a cyber-incident occurs, cybersecurity budgeting miraculously increases. The question is where your company should allocate funds for threat mitigation and prevention of reoccurrence.
Budgeting after a successful cyberattack typically involves establishing security governance, resolving the attack quickly, and minimizing damages by deploying more robust data and application security, data and operations recovery, and steps to prevent attack reoccurrence.
The critical considerations for your budget after a security breach include:
In-Depth Defense
The ultimate security control is prevention right at the entry points. You can’t install a weak front door because your valuables are in a hidden tamper-proof safe. The fact is that the criminal is right inside your home, hence need an appropriate security level at different layers. When budgeting, all control levels must commensurate to the actual value of the data or asset requiring protection.
The Principle of Least Privilege
Authorization to access vital assets should follow a need-to-know basis. Here, access is set to “deny all” by default, and access control issued based on roles as required by task responsibilities and under the management’s approval. Your budget should focus on functional application security, whitelisting, controls changes, separation, and segmentation of duties.
Information Security Business Risk
Protection should be provided based on business risk, driven by security risk assessment and aligning with specific business objectives. For instance, some entities lack an external web presence. Others have a web presence and lack brick-and-mortar stores. Consequently, the budgeting must include spending on protection based on the company’s business model.
Final Thoughts
Cybersecurity is now a crucial component in most companies’ budgets. Both small and established entities face ever-growing threats and increasingly complicated attacks, and you cannot afford to suffer the financial implications. Even after a successful attack, you’ll need a sufficient budget to address the attack, mitigate the damage, and protect your systems from such attacks in the future.
The above tips will help you create an excellent cybersecurity budget to address your organization’s needs. However, you can always get it right when you work with a reliable IT consultant and cybersecurity expert, and that’s where Mathe Inc. comes in. The company is well equipped to deliver reliable, stable, and secure cloud infrastructure to keep your company’s data and digital assets safe.
Schedule a free consultation today, and discuss your cybersecurity needs with our experts.
With over 35 years in the business of supporting and implementing technology for the SME market, and 6 years previously in Corporate IT and Voice. I have seen a great deal of change. The only common thread is I have always focused on the Business Wise application of Technology. We always try to look 5 years ahead of the current technology to make sure our clients are on the right track to meet current and future needs.
