A survey conducted by Altman Vilandrie & Company, a strategy consulting group based in the United States, studied how many firms have been subject to a security breach and what did it cost them as such.
The results showed that as much as 48% of the 400 IT executives surveyed told that a security breach had hit them and that the total cost of the breaches came up to be 13% of the total revenues for smaller firms.
Insights from the survey
The survey (Pdf) included 400 IT executives being asked for responses on various topics such as the costs associated with such breaches, use cases for IoT, challenges faced by the respective firms with regards to security, how security vendors are selected and much more.
The executives included individuals from across 19 industries with organizations ranging from small start-ups to large multinational companies.
The cost break up was according to company size. That is, for small companies, the cost of IoT breaches was 13.4% of the total revenues where small companies were considered as those which earned less than $5 million in revenues annually.
For larger companies, the cost amounted to millions of dollars with an estimate indicating that around $20 million could be lost due to such cyber attacks for companies that were earning $2 billion annually in revenues.
Selection criteria of vendors
The survey revealed that companies consider price as secondary to factors such reliability and quality when it comes to choosing IoT security vendors.
As such, it has been suggested that IoT security providers build their brands as organizations look for vendors that have an established reputation in the industry and offer superior services.
This is, however, not surprising as security breaches can cost a lot and as such, regardless of how much the price of an IoT security service is, it is more than compensated by the safety with which an organization can operate its functions.
Other findings
The survey showed that those who have had invested significantly in IoT security had not experienced a breach as compared to those who had not.
Furthermore, it was revealed that 74% of the organizations had their IoT security system centralized, even though different business units had different security needs.
Takeaways
Overall, Altman Vilandrie & Company indicated that despite many companies having traditional cybersecurity measures in place, IoT security was still not the major concern in various organizations.
Source: Altman Vilandrie & Company | Image Credit: Shutterstock/Chombosan
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