Stew Parkin, CTO (EMEA) at Assured Data Protection, was interviewed by IT Pro recently on how businesses can reduce their cyber security costs.
Rene Millman at IT Pro said: "Nothing is off the table in a recession, but businesses must be careful to reduce cyber security costs without compromising on safety.
With recession looming in the UK, businesses face the prospect of cutting back in several areas to ensure survival. Nothing is off the table and, unfortunately, this can also mean reducing budgets for cyber security.
Amid rising costs and efforts to keep energy bills under control, businesses might need to be creative and seek savings from areas such as cloud computing expenditure and even cyber security. The latter, however, might seem a dangerous prospect, given the rising spectre of cyber threats like ransomware.
Two-thirds (67%) of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) spend less than $50,000 annually on cyber security, with 57% fearing inflation will lead to a change in plans, resulting in budget cuts, according to OpenText Security.
This anxiety comes despite a recent surge in cyber attacks, highlighting the need for properly funded cyber security strategy. In fact, it poses the very pertinent question of how can organisations possibly maintain the same level of protection while aiming to slash budgets.
The guiding principles for reducing costs
One does not take a knife to cyber security budgets lightly; there needs to be a handful of guiding principles to ensure basic standards are maintained while the risks are mitigated.
Stew Parkin, tells IT Pro one of the things he has witnessed is customers starting to consider reducing the overlap of features and functionalities included within the products they’re buying.
“Companies are often rushed to market to buy as much as they can to fit a specific gap,” he says. “However, these gaps can now be filled by a single or a reduced list of vendors or products. Cost efficiencies are often to be found by the consolidation of licences, but also by the consolidation of skills within the internal teams and security operations centres (SOCs).”
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