Prevention costs significantly less than cyber incidents.
IBM recently published their annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, which gives valuable insights in the developments of cyber incidents and the various costs of data breaches. One thing is very clear when we review this report – the technical impact of a cyber incident is just the starting point of the costs that occur. The costs of loss of operations exceed that of what is considered regular downtime for manufacturing. The inability to service customers has much bigger impact than that of an unexpected outage for service industry and ecommerce. Why? Because malicious actors have specialized in maximizing the damage to force their victims to pay up in ransomware cases, or cause maximum harm and downtime when their goal is to incapacitate their victims.
Prevention should not be seen as a cost that is up for negotiations during the next annual budget round. Prevention should also not be seen as a burden that hinders business. Prevention is a business enabler that ensures business continuation despite cyberattacks. Because this is what all leaders and executives must be aware of. Cyberattacks will happen and their complexity and frequency will only continue to increase. There is no way of stopping that (for now). All we can and must do is protect of infrastructure against the impact!
An area to which we have to pay attention is the huge legacy of manufacturing and infrastructure equipment that was installed long before the current cyberthreats emerged and for which we still need to be able to prevent the perfect storm from happening. See the keynote Back to the Future Cyber Security – An action plan to ensure Cyber Security for our existing Manufacturing facilities and infrastructure by Dr. ir Johannes Drooghaag.
Prevention costs significantly less than cyber incidents!
Dr. ir Johannes Drooghaag – CEO Spearhead Management