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The ROI in Preventing Cybersecurity Breaches

Proactively investing in and maintaining a strong cybersecurity defense can protect a company’s brand and reputation.
It’s surprising that cybersecurity is not at the forefront of the minds of c-suite executives running small and mid-sized companies. Perhaps these executives believe that data breaches only happen in large companies. However, cyberattacks can happen to any company at any time. In fact, smaller companies may be more of a target because hackers realize these organizations often lack sufficient expertise to deal with cyberattacks. Failing to secure a company’s cybersecurity is simply not an option anymore. It needs to be a priority.

Today’s Reality

The cybersecurity attacks on large organizations, such as Capital One and Equifax, are in the news frequently. These attacks often result in significant data breaches and ransomware assaults. Rectifying a cyberattack is an expensive task for any size organization in terms of effort, time, and cost, depending on the degree of damage. But the attacks on smaller organizations are increasing, costing an average of $1.1 million per attack. Cyberattacks do not always succeed in penetrating the network of a company, but if they do, the result of one attack can be catastrophic, potentially forcing the organization to cease operations due to the lasting financial damage.

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SAP Cybersecurity in an Age of Uncertainty

According to Risk Based Security’s 2019 MidYear QuickView Data Breach Report, the first six months of 2019 saw more than 3,800 publicly disclosed cyberattacks exposing more than 4 billion compromised records, with 3.2 billion of those records exposed by just eight breaches. Making matters worse, an overwhelming percentage of the compromised personal or strategic data was considered highly sensitive, yet was stored on unsecured routers and gateways — an oversight that offered cyber attackers ready access and scores of opportunities to steal and misuse data. Just to provide scope and context, think about this: Some 700 message servers that hold highly sensitive data are currently open to the internet in the US, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division.

With SAP systems containing very sensitive and confidential data, there is a critical need for organizations to perform a regular audit of these systems to check their security and data integrity and to identify system vulnerabilities before potential attackers do. Knowing the weaknesses and gaps in a system is the first step in empowering management to deal with those vulnerabilities in a proactive, concise, and effective way.