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Cybersecurity Is A Strategic Business Investment

Cybersecurity Is A Strategic Business Investment

Companies often skimp on cybersecurity, but it’s a vital part of long-term business survival.

Cybersecurity isn’t just a cost—it’s a strategic investment that could save your business from financial and reputational ruin. Read along as Cybersecurity experts from Acronis help you challenge the conventional mindset, exploring why prioritizing cybersecurity is essential for long-term growth and resilience in today’s digital age. 

Why do you believe cybersecurity is a strategic business investment rather than just an operational cost? 

2024 global cybercrime afflicted businesses with USD$9.5 trillion in costs, per Cybersecurity Ventures. That reflects the globalization and industrialization of cybercrime, helped in part by technologies like automation and AI. The cost of entry to become a cybercriminal is extremely low.  Thus, protecting your business against cybercrime is simply basic, solid risk management against an extremely highly probable risk.  

Cybersecurity Is A Strategic Business Investment

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What are some long-term business risks companies face when they skimp on cybersecurity budgets for Cybersecurity As a Strategic Business Investment? 

Businesses can suffer a range of serious risks if they neglect investments in cybersecurity. They may face compliance scrutiny and fines from regulators (e.g., GDPR for companies with customers in the EU.) There are opportunity costs from downtime, e.g., lost sales and renewals during a ransomware attack. Customers and prospects may lose trust in the business if it fails to protect their sensitive data or undergoes cybercrime driven outages. Cybercriminals may steal valuable intellectual property, as often is the goal in technology supply-chain attacks. Publicly held companies often lose equity following news of a privacy breach. And there are the employee downtime costs associated with data loss and downtime from cybercrime. 

Can you explain how investing in cybersecurity can directly impact a company’s profitability and market reputation?

Many industries measure the cost of downtime in tens of millions of dollars, e.g., automobile manufacturing. The ability to maintain that uptime, and to recover in a matter of minutes when downtime does occur, is easily calculated. But even in businesses where downtime is only measured in thousands of dollars per hour, an extended outage (days or weeks) can be lethal to customer relationships, and in smaller businesses, an existential threat to the business itself. It is generally easier to think of the benefits of cybersecurity in terms of risk avoidance, a form of insurance that spreads out the cost of a highly likely, expensive adverse event over a period of years instead of in one potentially catastrophic payment.  

Why is cybersecurity training for all employees essential, not just for the IT team? 

Cybercriminals are equal-opportunity attackers, using technologies like GenAI to make their phishing attacks more convincing, and automation to spray and iterate attacks across the entire organization. Phishing accounts for somewhere north of 80% of all successful breaches: its efficacy means that every employee needs to have their cyber antennae regularly tuned, because every single one of them will eventually get an email whose attachments or links will invite malware into the business. But it’s important not to ignore senior leadership in your training efforts, as they get special attention from attackers. The bosses are the ones likeliest to be able to move money, access sensitive systems, and if impersonated get employees to perform damaging actions.  

What common misconceptions do businesses have about cybersecurity training, and how can these be addressed?

One pernicious belief is that it’s a one-time occurrence, e.g., new hires get a cybersecurity awareness training module, and they are good to go. In the age of GenAI, where cybercriminals no longer even need basic proficiency in a language to craft convincing phishing emails, employees from the top to the bottom of the organization need to be regularly reminded, at least once or twice a year, on how to handle email and other messages as potential threats, and other basics of safe handling of sensitive internal and customer data.  

 

How does human error contribute to cybersecurity breaches, and what types of training can reduce these risks? 

The modern worker must process hundreds of not thousands of messages every day, between email, SMS, collab apps like Slack and Teams, social media messaging, and so on. The combination of a need for speed, the volume of information, and fatigue is inevitably going to lead to somebody clicking on a link or attachment they shouldn’t. That is the numbers game of phishing: iterate enough attempts and somebody eventually clicks, hence phishing’s role in >80% of successful attacks. So, the counter-tactic is to sharpen employees’ basic instincts about messaging so that they are likelier to spot a dubious message before they click. Criminal success is a near-certainty – hence the importance of having good recovery technology in place as well – but even small reductions in the number of successful phishes can yield concrete financial returns.  

How should businesses balance investing in technology with investing in employee cybersecurity education? 

There’s a huge accumulation of best practices knowledge that insists both defense and recovery are equally essential to good cybersecurity risk management. Think about cybersecurity frameworks like NIST CSF and CIS Critical Security Controls, and the requirements of regulatory regimes like GDPR, and the new tougher insurance industry standards to qualify for cyber insurance. They all say essentially the same thing: defend but ensure you can recover when defenses fail. Defense in depth is essential to deter and prevent cybercrime-driven downtime and data loss, but businesses must embrace the essential inevitability of a successful attack over the long term, and so invest in their ability to recover from it with processes like backup, disaster recovery and incident response planning.   

 

Why is it dangerous to rely solely on IT teams for cybersecurity in today’s evolving threat landscape? 

Most IT staff are overburdened with the daily treadmill of handling trouble tickets, patching vulnerabilities, basic incident response, new hire onboarding, and so on. With cybercriminals getting better, more efficient and high volume in their attacks, helped by automation and AI, it is easy to fall behind if the burden of cybersecurity falls solely on IT’s shoulder. Businesses with good cybersecurity risk management practices enlist the entire organization in the fight, giving workers at the front line to tools they need to stop cyberattacks before they occur.  

What organizational strategies can businesses adopt to create a security-conscious culture across all departments? 

It’s easy for the typical employee to view cybersecurity as an annoying impediment to productivity (think of Dilbert’s cybersecurity guy Mordac, Preventer of IT Services) that just needs to be ignored when it’s the end of the quarter and the work must get done. It’s thus essential to enlist senior leadership in the overall effort to combat cyber risk: the discipline must be woven into every business process. That message sticks better when it comes from the top down, when it’s the boss insisting that cybersecurity is everyone’s job, essential to company profitability, customer trust, regulatory compliance, and growing shareholder value.  

 

Can you share a real-world example where a business avoided a major cybersecurity incident due to proactive investment in training or technology? 

 This is a bit of a “prove the negative” question, as it is hard to come up with concrete examples of how and why something didn’t happen. But there are abundant examples every day of the obverse of that coin, another newsflash every week of a cyber breach that compromised hundreds of millions of sensitive customer records. So, the risk management mindset looks at this question and says, “What’s a reasonable investment in ensuring our business does not become one of those headlines?” 

 

Cybersecurity is no longer just about protection—it’s about empowerment. How much could your business grow if you treated security not as a cost, but as an investment in resilience, trust, and opportunity?