August 2024

Opting for cheap cybersecurity solutions could prove more costly than you think.

Today's business leaders face tough decisions in balancing rising costs, and cybersecurity often becomes an area where they consider cutting expenses. While the necessity of cybersecurity is understood, many don't see significant differences between various solutions on the market. Effective security operates behind the scenes, making it hard to appreciate its true value. Consequently, many business leaders opt for cheaper alternatives, believing a penny saved is a penny earned.

Does this sound familiar? Read on to see how cutting cybersecurity costs in the short term can often lead to large expenses down the road.

What Are Your Chances?

It is true that free or low-cost antivirus solutions can deflect some simple attacks, but in today’s evolving threatscape, simple attacks are not the primary concern. Most threat actors are financially motivated (93% of attacks), which drives improvements in their tools and techniques. As a result, attack sophistication is growing, and 66% of organizations worldwide fell victim to ransomware between March 2022 and March 2023, according to a Statista survey.

For example, the exploitation of known software vulnerabilities is a rising attack vector. MITRE ATT&CK's List of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) has documented over 237,000 vulnerabilities. Basic antivirus software is ill-equipped to detect, analyze, and respond to this type of attack. Businesses appear to understand this. A 2024 Ponemon Institute report found that only 38% of respondents are confident in their organization's ability to detect and respond to known vulnerabilities, and 47% said it takes their organizations at least a month to respond to critical software vulnerabilities.

Another example of increasing attack sophistication is the growing number of cloud breaches. As workloads increasingly move to the cloud, many businesses experience unforeseen expenses, downtime, and lost revenue due to cloud attacks. Basic cybersecurity and antivirus tools may offer some protection on the endpoint but lack the detection and proactive protocols necessary to secure workloads in the cloud.

The True Cost of Low-Quality Cybersecurity

As prices rise across the board, the cost of a data breach is no exception. IBM Security's study of 553 organizations affected by data breaches between March 2022 and March 2023 found the average total cost reached $4.45 million in 2023. Alarmingly, only a third of companies discovered the breach themselves, underscoring the importance of high-quality threat detection support. Costs were nearly $1 million higher when attackers disclosed the breach.

At ESET, we advocate for a prevention-first approach to stop threats before they cause harm. Detecting malware after a breach can result in significant costs in the form of disruptions, revenue losses due to downtime, lost customers, and damage to reputation. According to IBM, these additional costs average $1.3 million.

Myth: Small Businesses Are Not Targets

Small businesses that cut cybersecurity costs, often believe the myth that cybercriminals only target large companies. In reality, 56% of SMBs have faced at least one cyberattack, and 78% fear they may not recover from a severe attack. In the U.S. alone, total cybercrime costs reached including data recovery costs, legal fees, regulatory fines and reputational damage are estimated around $320 billion annually and expected to increase to approximately $1.82 trillion by 2028. These growing figures show that businesses of all sizes are targets for cybercrime. Investing in high-quality cybersecurity is crucial to curb these escalating costs.

Price of Performance

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as the saying goes. What appears on the surface as a free or low-cost antivirus solution is often a way to lock you into a vendor’s ecosystem or entrap your business into hidden upsell costs down the line. The true price of cheap security can sometimes take the form of poor customer service, operability and performance issues, low-quality telemetry, or overall vendor lock-in that is difficult to extricate from.

When evaluating a cybersecurity solution, we recommend consulting independent viewpoints to compare price-to-performance metrics. ESET products consistently rank high on third-party review sites for automation, ease-of-use, and seamless operation. The quality of ESET protection has been repeatedly acknowledged in numerous comparatives over the years. As a global leader in digital security with more than 30 years of experience and 1 billion protected internet users, you’re investing in high performance, ease of management, high reputation, and overall reliability. Don’t see the free cybersecurity option listed on the comparative test? There’s a reason for that.

Investing in the Future

The idea of a free cybersecurity solution that meets all business needs while saving money may sound appealing, but it is far from realistic. As cyberthreats grow more sophisticated and IT processes become increasingly complex, a proper cybersecurity solution must address both issues simultaneously. Failing to do so can lead to business losses, operational disruptions, and lost clients. Remember, you have only one reputation, and it is worth more than any savings on a subpar cybersecurity product.

To ensure comprehensive protection and peace of mind, consider the following benefits of ESET:

• Leading Cybersecurity Technology: ESET PROTECTis an AI-native, prevention-first solution backed by 30 years of excellence. The multilayered technology combines machine learning, AI, a cloud reputation system, and human expertise to stop attacks before they enter your system.
• Unified Ecosystem: ESET PROTECT decreases the attack surface area by combining modern endpoint protection, server protection, threat hunting, mobile threat defense, cloud app protection, Vulnerability & Patch Management, and much more into one unified solution.
• Centralized Management: With ESET’s cloud-first ESET PROTECT Platform, you have a complete overview of your security from a single pane of glass.