How Can Cybersecurity Improve Your Business Bottom Line?

Every critical function in your business needs to do one of two things: either the function increases revenue or it decreases cost. Functions that do something else are cost-centers.

Effective cybersecurity is a critical function. Ineffective cybersecurity is a cost center.

How can you demonstrate that your cybersecurity program is a critical function?

The correct answer -- which is hard work -- is that you need to demonstrate how your cybersecurity program contributes to the company's return on investment (ROI). But for a lot of cybersecurity programs, it's more important to be effective than correct. (As they say in the world of hedge fund management, do you want to be right or make money?) 

The effective cybersecurity approach requires that you understand the following: what market you're working in, who your partners are, and how your cybersecurity program enhances what the organization values while minimizing annoyance. Then, as we say elsewhere, "you prove that cybersecurity works by adopting the best system, adding governance, auditing the system, anticipating the changing threat environment, and adopting cybersecurity as a performance management element. Period."

So, how can cybersecurity improve your bottom line and prove its role as a process that is a critical function?

We at Pythia have worked with organizations at different degrees of cybersecurity maturity. Some organizations are very small, and some are gigantic Fortune-10-sized behemoths, and then there are ones in the middle. Your cybersecurity system improves bottom lines through its maturity relative to different levels of organizational maturity. "One size does not fit all": more advanced organizations have many processes and cybersecurity is one of those many processes. if it is consistently at least as mature as other processes, it is adding to the bottom line.

We're creating a set of materials on our main splash page that explains how this happens for organizations at different levels of maturity. Ask us how Pythia can help you position your cybersecurity function as a mature process within your organization.