At its heart, the only IT security that really matters is the security of your data. At the end of the day, all those bad actors out there may want to amuse themselves with meddling with your internal operations, causing you embarrassment or trying to damage your brand reputation—but it’s the data you are storing about your customers, partners and activities that is the prize.
The CIO gets this—as does the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and their colleagues the CDO (Chief Digital) or CPO (Chief People) Officer. They take pains to maintain a secure posture, encourage information hygiene best practice, and follow compliance and data privacy strictures like GDPR, or in regulated sectors, standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA and so on.
To back this up, enterprises put in significant resources into cybersecurity. Last year, the world spent at least $80 million on IT security; it is expected to climb to more like $90 billion by the end of this year; IT analyst group Gartner says on average, larger organisations spend about 3.4% of total revenue on IT and an average of 0.12 to 0.3% of company revenue on protecting that infrastructure.
Put like that, maybe doesn’t sound too much… but that actually stacks up well against what large corporations spend on what’s called casualty insurance, or their main liability coverage of an individual or organisation for negligent acts or omissions; that’s typically less, so 0.138 to 0.232%.
Filling any cyber knowledge gaps
There’s no room for complacency here. IT security spending has been slowed by global winds of economic uncertainty. Late last year, analysis showed after a 16% rise in 2020-21 and a 17% in 2021-2022, in 2023-24 it only went up by 6%--a 65% decrease.
Even if this is happening for all the right current commercial reasons, spending less protecting your information assets means the walls around your castle keep are just that little bit lower than they could be.
There is also the crucial issue of where that money is going. While we all know it’s the data that we need to keep as secure as possible, the fact is that it’s the infrastructure, databases and applications that the data lives in that are the weak spots.
Or—are they? Far too often, the CIO and the CISO, for all their diligence, can end up not giving enough priority to protecting the most critical part of the tech stack—the network.
Internal corporate IT teams may also lack a deep enough technical team able to help them. After all, the enterprise IT leader needs to be on top of blocking off any and all weak points in their physical devices or software cyber attackers could be probing, like poor server surveillance and lack of device protection to operating system vulnerabilities and lack of frequent antivirus updates.
Dedicated denial of service is a particular nightmare, as is malware injection or ransomware. In 2023, that last threat alone may have cost businesses over a billion dollars for the first time—twice what criminals managed to extort out of CFOs in 2022.
In-depth understanding of the cyber threat landscape
There’s a very healthy cybersecurity vendor community out there, which may hit over $408.6 billion by 2032. But a lot of the focus of these players is on other areas of the stack than the network.
There is also a proliferation of so-say ‘point’ tools, that promise a lot but which can also raise the question of where they best fit. Finally, there’s a growing need to move away from total reliance on just one hyperscaler public-private cloud partner and into multi-cloud—which also throws the network protection problem back on you, the customer, at least to some extent. Faced with this complexity, more and more large enterprises who see the network as a strategic asset want to work with network, and not just software, application or cloud cybersecurity specialists. You need a partner to help you ensure you have the right defences in place.
Here, SNS can be more than helpful--especially of you lack a big enough internal cyber team.
This is because we understand the landscape that confronts each such player, plus what works and what doesn’t in other large IT contexts--and so can provide the best-in-class security consultancy that will ensure you protect your business.
Implement the right security programme for your organisation, as cost-effectively as possible
For example, SNS has in-house security professionals ready to perform a comprehensive analysis and provide best-practice guidance to fully protect your network and users.
That’s also across the main potential areas an enterprise needs to be concerned about:
- threat analysis—running over all the nodes in your network to expose gaps or vulnerabilities in your infrastructure so they can be eliminated
- security processes, i.e., the best current ways to implement security for your network throughout your organisation (and at all levels)
- security policies—as in, reviewing and revising all your current security policies so you have complete control while minimising risk and clear operational processes and practices.
But perhaps most crucially, best-in-class security implementation—as our main business is building secure networks.
As a result, we can show you how you can implement the right security programme for your organisation—and as cost-effectively as possible.
If working with people who really know how a network works--and so give you the best security foundation you can get for all your information—sounds like a strategy your CFO would like, check out our security service range--maybe after you remind yourself of the full set of enterprise connectivity solutions we offer clients.
Once reassured, the next step suggests itself: even if you choose whether to get SNS to implement the best security answers for you, work with other vendors or choose to go it alone, use our expertise to inform your thinking with the benefit of industry-leading security guidance.
Connect with us today, then, to give your enterprise the key to real data security at the network level.
