Too often, security professionals are expected to do more with less. They’re hit with budget cut after budget cut as organizational leadership prioritizes competitiveness and time to market over cybersecurity. They’re left scrambling to protect corporate assets with only a fraction of the resources they need.
This is not a picture of a healthy organization, nor one with a strong security posture. However, the other end of the spectrum is unhealthy in different ways. An organization that spares no expense, throwing money at its security team with abandon.
The key to good security isn’t to spend more money. It’s to allocate your budget more effectively. Let’s talk about a few ways you can do so.
Get an Assessment Done
If your organization has never received an assessment from a reputable third-party vendor, then you probably aren’t allocating your security budget correctly. By carrying out a thorough evaluation of your hardware, software, data, threat landscape, and business assets, you can determine both what needs to be protected and what you need to protect it from.
More importantly, by having an expert examine your existing security processes, you can identify and eliminate potential weaknesses in your security posture.
Leverage Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity AI has come a long way in recent years. Single-agent threat and intrusion detection systems are now just as capable of identifying and mitigating threats as traditional multi-agent security tools. They’re frequently easier to both deploy and manage, allowing your security team to focus their attention on identifying and eliminating advanced persistent threats.
In other words, with AI-enabled cybersecurity, you can both eliminate cumbersome legacy tools and streamline your personnel.
Encourage Organization-Wide Investment
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. More often than not, the greatest threat to your organization’s security isn’t an external attacker, but your own employees. They’re the ones who inadvertently download ransomware, the ones who use insecure passwords and engage in unsafe browsing practices.
By arming them with a better understanding of security and equipping them with the tools to handle minor issues, such as password resets, by themselves, you can reduce strain on your organization’s IT department while simultaneously ensuring you have to spend less money cleaning up security incidents.
Remember: Security Costs Less Than a Data Breach
Cybersecurity doesn’t need to break the bank, nor should it. While it’s not technically possible to spend too much on security tools and processes, it is possible to focus your budget on the wrong things. A good security budget simply requires that you understand your business’s needs, assets, and the unique threats it faces.
Provided you have this knowledge, everything else should fall readily into place.