Photo Source: Bill Brooks

In today’s cybersecurity threat landscape, all companies regardless of vertical, size or complexity require a strategic security approach. To protect their business, their customers, their business partners.

There are two reasons that companies today don’t have the right security program.

  • Inadequate Security Budget
  • The wrong or absent security strategy. A lack of a risk based program.  In other words a lack of a program that addresses the unique risks as opposed to a “one size fits all” approach.

The latter is the most prevalent reason for companies burning their money in vein when it comes to security.

What does your company needs to do? Create an intelligent approach that addresses your company’s risks.

These will vary by companies across different verticals and even for companies in the same sector due to differences in business models, infrastructure, technology and operational models.

So as you plan your security budget or continue spending on security keep this in mind.

While cyber risks are typically communicated in terms of IT impacts, their effects can extend far beyond into market, credit, and other business risk areas.

Aligning cyber risks to business-specific risk profiles provides the information required for leaders to triage and prioritize cyber investments.

There are three distinct stakeholders who should be involved in the security budget.  Business, Security and Information Technology. These are some of the questions these stakeholders need to ask to ensure a security budget that can help create the right program and budget:

Questions Business needs to ask:

  • What are the particular cyber risks for my business?
  • How should those risks be weighted or prioritized?
  • How should I invest to maximize my coverage?

Questions Security needs to ask:

  • How do I ensure a complete coverage of the business
  • What is the proper use of cyber data to derive risk agenda
  • How do I construct an appropriate control suite
  • How do I design the right Cyber risk management architecture

Questions Information technology needs to ask:

  • What are the technologies relevant to my environment?
  • How do I get the technologies I need to get my job done? 

Ask these to Plan your security budget wisely. And to Spend your security dollars effectively.

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Pamela Gupta, President OutSecure