CDM-CYBER-DEFENSE-eMAGAZINE-March-2019

Why We Need to Rip-off the Cybersecurity Band-Aids
By Anne Baker, Vice President of Marketing, Adaptiva
Last year at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, the Oracle of Omaha, Warren
Buffet, proclaimed, “I don’t know that much about cyber, but I do think that’s the number one
problem with mankind.” He ranked cyberattacks above the threat of nuclear and biological
warfare. The admission endures at a time when cyberattacks continue to spike. Cyberattacks are
projected to cost companies $6 trillion annually by 2021, and the market to defend systems,
software, and applications is expected to reach $1 trillion within the next three years.
Plenty of vendors have risen up to take advantage. Estimates on the number of companies
offering cybersecurity solutions range from 1,500 to well over 2,000. This makes the sea of options
very difficult to wade through and differentiate at a time when cyber challenges grow increasingly
complex. It also results in companies cobbling together a huge number of products and services
that don’t necessarily integrate in a desperate bid to protect their networks.
Studies have shown that companies frequently utilize in excess of 70 different security vendors.
Not only does this create massively complex IT environments, but it is expensive and very difficult
to manage. This leads to problems like the Ponemon Institute found in its 2017 Cost of Data
Breach Study in which companies reported that it took an average of 191 days for them to identify
a data breach and another 66 days to contain a breach. These delays underscore how IT
departments not only struggle to find problems but also have difficulty containing and fixing them
once they are detected. Let’s reflect for just a minute on all the damage that could occur during
those months while an attack goes unrecognized. The costs to companies could easily exceed
millions of dollars.