Making a cybersecurity business case with data-driven insights

CyberSecurity business case with data insights

Data-driven insights for cybersecurity business case

Mitigating risks and avoiding cyberattacks should be a key corporate objective for any industry in the current digital age. Ensuring your business has the right cyber risk data is crucial when building digital defences and protecting sensitive information. Data-driven insights allow companies to better understand their security posture and enable them to take the necessary steps to improve cybersecurity measures and secure their data.  

Let’s take a closer look at the top cyber risk data points that your organisation should be collecting and analysing, and how you can make a cybersecurity business case with data-driven insights. 

Data-driven insights in relation to business performance 

Making a cybersecurity business case with data-driven insights is key to securing your organisation’s data. And this data is always best automated and observed via external analysis. Using this data can provide an objective and comprehensive view of your company’s security initiative. You’ll receive a detailed overview of your organisation’s security performance based on past exposures and intelligence to improve overall security measures. Automation is crucial because it eliminates the need for human intervention which can slow down the cybersecurity assessment process and sometimes allow errors to creep in. 

Using data-driven insights delivers real business results. They help prevent data breaches, reduce an organisation’s attack surface, and protect against cyberattacks. Let’s take a look how.

1. Quantifying cybersecurity risk in financial terms 

Even today, CEOs and CFOs can struggle to get their heads around the importance of cybersecurity and the weight that it holds. History has shown that senior managers understand that data breaches occur and can cost the company millions, but it has proven a difficult task for them to quantify the actual impact on their organisation’s balance sheets. They only see things in one light: What financial costs are at stake with the company’s current security posture? It is therefore extremely important to quantify cybersecurity risk with financial risk.  

RiskXchange’s instant risk ratings are key to helping your business bolster cybersecurity measures and fight attacks. They can help your business understand the financial implications of failing to improve cybersecurity measures. RiskXchange quantifies and proactively helps you mitigate cyber risk across your entire third-party and fourth-party ecosystem by delivering real-time continuous risk ratings and analysis using our advanced risk quantification methods. Our methods are enriched with a wide range of public, private cyber and business intelligence. Providing you and your vendors with the collaboration tools and actionable information needed to manage cyber risk and compliance across your combined digital ecosystem. 

2. Communicating risk to the C-suite 

Once cybersecurity risk has been quantified in terms of potential financial risk, the C-suite should take notice. The question now is how you can effectively communicate your company’s cybersecurity performance and justify how you should protect your organisation against specific types of attacks, such as ransomware or supply chain attacks. Business leaders won’t want to hear the complex ins and outs of the technology or systems used, they will simply want to know how well the cybersecurity measures are protecting their business, their data and reputation, whether they are better protected than their competitors or whether they can convince investors and customers that their business is secure.  

A simple and easy-to-understand metric to demonstrate the above is via RiskXchange’s instant risk ratings platform. Just like a credit score, RiskXchange’s instant ratings grade your company’s security posture on a numerical scale, the higher the number reflects a better security posture.  

Using data-driven insights, instant risk ratings provide insights into how your company is performing on any given day, as well as providing opportunities for improvement. The insights gained can help managers make informed decisions about how to apply funds and resources to better support your company’s cybersecurity efforts to continually improve your risk profile. 

Cybersecurity Business Case Details

Cyber risk management should always be in complete alignment with overall business objectives. Utilising a process that monitors, collects, and analyses cyber risk data in an automated way is the best way to achieve this goal. This data can be used to compile actionable recommendations which can be presented to senior managers and C-suite level executives to secure additional resources to improve your company’s security posture. 

Using external cybersecurity firms like RiskXchange to provide instant risk ratings can help you formulate a better cybersecurity plan for your business and its entire supply chain. Instant ratings grade your security performance by how well information is protected within your network. It is extremely important to protect your data and to prevent security breaches with cybersecurity ratings – they are as important as your organisation’s finances and reputation.  

Get in touch with RiskXchange to find out more about making a cybersecurity business case with data-driven insights.