Many view cybersecurity purely as a cost center, an unavoidable expense akin to insurance. Organizations make a relatively small investment in cybersecurity tools and personnel to prevent the much larger costs of a data breach — and that’s not a bad deal. Large enterprise organizations spend an average of $5.7 million on cybersecurity annually or 13.6% of their total IT budget, while the average cost of a single data breach is $4.88 million, according to the 2024 IBM Cost of a Data Breach report. These organizations face thousands of attacks every year that could result in a data breach. When weighing the investment against the potential costs, there’s a clear and compelling business case for cybersecurity.
Yet, this is a limiting mindset. It creates a dynamic in which the incentive is to spend as little as possible. Under this thinking, companies should spend just enough to prevent large data breaches, because any excess spending beyond that point is a waste.
That’s just wrong.
To challenge this notion, we’ll reframe cybersecurity investment, not as a cost center, but as a business enabler. Companies can be strategic in their cybersecurity spending to help their organization thrive. A mature security posture can open new markets or clients for the business, increase operational efficiency internally, and make the company more competitive within their market.
Customers want to be assured their data is safe when patronizing a business. This applies for both individual consumers and business-to-business agreements. Indeed, 2023 research by Vercara found that 66% of U.S. consumers would not trust a company that falls victim to a data breach with their data, and 44% of consumers blame the company’s lack of security measures for the breach. A lack of investment today erodes an organization’s reputation in the market and deters future business.
However, a lack of security maturity can also block a company out of lucrative markets and clientele. This leading API management platform developer faced this predicament. Over and over, their sales team was asked about their cybersecurity maturity. “[Prospects] want to know that we’re not vulnerable to breaches, so they’re curious about our security and penetration scores”, explained the technical program manager. Moreover, some companies were looking for very specific security criteria before doing business, such as meeting ISO, HIPAA, and FedRAMP compliance requirements.
When the API platform developer set a goal of $10 million in net new revenue for fiscal year 2026, it was clear that cybersecurity was the path to achieving this goal. They partnered with SecureOps to build a custom Security Operations Center (SOC), which provided access to an 18-person team with extensive experience managing world-class security operations. “This structure provides us with the personnel and architecture to improve our security posture without burdening the internal teams.”
Now the API platform developer is well on their way to earning the security certifications their customers expect. They can now position their robust security maturity as a trust signal rather than a liability, attracting new customers and helping retain the ones they already have.
The business landscape has been fundamentally reshaped by the digital transformations of the 21st century. To compete in today’s market, organizations must utilize the advanced technologies available to them. Remote work, cloud adoption, AI integration, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and many others are essential to modern operational efficiency. Moreover, these capabilities are important for more than just fulfillment. Professionals want to work at forward-thinking, cutting-edge organizations. A lack of technological maturity may be a barrier to recruiting top talent.
Most importantly, these capabilities require a secure environment. Before our luxury retailer client partnered with SecureOps, they faced significant bottlenecks in firewall change requests, creating delays to critical business processes. A senior executive at the luxury retailer said, “What should take days was often taking weeks or even months, leading to complaints from business stakeholders eager to move faster.”
The team also lacked formalized documentation. Instead, they were forced to rely on an informal transfer of knowledge without standardization or automation. “This often meant our IT team had to ‘reinvent the wheel’ for basic tasks like identifying source and destination protocols, leading to frequent escalations and hindering efficiency”, said the IT executive.
The overburdened IT team hindered the larger business and worse yet, created vulnerabilities themselves. “We often had to prioritize business projects, which sometimes meant delaying essential maintenance, upgrades, and cleanup.”
Only by expanding their security resources, through a partnership with SecureOps, was this luxury retailer able to alleviate the bottlenecks in their operations. Now enjoying greater operational efficiency, the IT executive observed, “a significant improvement in the resolution of vulnerabilities.”
Let’s assume for a moment that cybersecurity investment is like an insurance policy. That means the quality of your policy matters a lot. When disaster strikes, the insurer must be able to remediate the problem or it truly is a waste.
It’s important to remember that a cybersecurity crisis can occur even if the internal security team did nothing wrong. It may not be your firewall configurations or network segmentation that creates the issue. Sometimes vulnerabilities come directly from your original equipment manufacturer (OEM) out-of-box.
Our multinational technology hardware and service client was confronted with critical vulnerabilities in their SSLVPN technology, including zero-day exploits. Adversaries were actively exploiting this vulnerability, and at any moment, one of them could gain a foothold in the network, leading to a devastating data breach. “Our customers were tracing attackers across their network back to their VPNs. Literally, they were getting hacked through these VPNs”, said Erik Montcalm, Vice President of Services and Technologies at SecureOps.
The OEM vendor’s response was confused and ineffectual. They released patching updates multiple times, with a new patch each day. “We patched it Friday, thinking the problem was solved. Then on Monday, we had to start over, because they reissued the patch. And then on Wednesday, they reissued the patch again,” said Montcalm.
SecureOps took charge, bringing in their team of architects to support the technicians on the crisis line. We wrote custom documentation on how to properly update the devices, because the OEM’s guidance remained insufficient. “We went all-hands-on deck, deploying 10 people over a weekend, manning the crisis line until it was resolved.”
Ultimately, the customer lost faith in the OEM provider and decided to accelerate their migration to Palo Alto SSLVPNs. Once again, the SecureOps partnership proved valuable. Our expertise and deep familiarity with the customer’s environment enabled us to complete the project in less than a month.
Technology is not a luxury in modern business. It’s the enabler of nearly all business activity today, and cybersecurity, whether proactive or in response to a crisis, makes these solutions viable. Without a mature security posture, every other asset in your tech stack is at risk and operating suboptimally. Think of cybersecurity, not as an inevitable cost, but the lubrication that keeps your business operation flowing smoothly.
Contact us today to learn how a mature security posture can be an asset in achieving your business goals.