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Those Deprioritizing Security Spending Will Face The Consequences in 2024
By Carlos Morales, SVP of Solutions, Vercara
Growing economic uncertainty caused enterprises to tighten their budgets this past year. These economic challenges will trickle into the start of 2024, and the temptation will be there for many organizations to cut spending even further. However, the biggest challenge these companies will face won’t be pinpointing where to cut costs; rather, they will be dealing with the aftermath of the cost cutting decisions they made in 2023. Those who curtailed spending on their cybersecurity posture will now face the consequences that come with deprioritizing security investments as they will have fallen behind attackers in the cybersecurity arms war.
Budget reallocations required business leaders to reduce spending across all areas of IT which, in today’s digital landscape, can have detrimental impacts on an enterprise if decisions are made strictly focusing on revenue while putting less importance on risk reduction. For instance, businesses that have moved their operations to the cloud have been left in a position where they not only have had to decrease spending but where they have had to further reconfigure budgets to keep up with ever-growing cloud costs. As new applications were launched and attracted more customer traffic, cloud costs have ballooned very quickly for many companies. To keep their cloud resources intact, many were willing to forgo cybersecurity investments – from eliminating certain solutions they deemed unnecessary at that moment to cutting corners on implementation of best practices to get recurring security costs down as significantly as possible.
Enterprises Will Pay the Price for Their Short-term Gain
While sacrificing spending on security may have helped some enterprises fund their cloud resources in 2023, this short-term gain is about to present them with major obstacles. Security is a critical component to cloud environments. According to IBM’s Data Breach Report 82% of breaches in 2023 involved data stored in the cloud. Businesses that deprioritized security have opened themselves up to increased risks, especially as attackers have gotten significantly more sophisticated in their tactics thanks to heavy investment from criminal enterprises and nation states. AI based technology has enabled more precise phishing/smishing capabilities and massively scaled cyberattacks. Cybercriminals sell themselves “as a service” also make the execution of attacks easier than ever for any threat actor. As a result, we can expect to see a steady rise in attacks targeting business of all types in 2024.
As these attacks mount, those that that previously reduced spend on security personnel, tools and services will be left ill-prepared to mitigate malicious attempts on their networks and applications. Without the proper prevention resources readily available, IT and security teams will face additional strain to keep their networks secure. We can expect to see a wave of instances where even the smallest crack leaves the door wide open for bad actors to infiltrate networks, and those lacking the necessary measures to meet the evolving threat landscape will be most susceptible. Cybersecurity response teams working with reduced staffs will add to the exposure as the opportunity to miss the signs of a cybersecurity attack will increase. I predict this will drive security strategies to quickly climb back on top of the priority list for enterprises in 2024 and open up emergency funding for services and staff in the second half of the year.
A More Positive Outlook on the Horizon
Economic uncertainty may linger as we enter the new year but there are also signs pointing to a more positive outlook by mid-year. Stock market projections are trending up, inflation is trending down, and the federal reserve typically cuts interest rates during election years. This will all drive more spending in business, and will allow businesses who placed security on the chopping block to reallocate funds towards shoring up their defenses. News of companies being hit by ransomware, taken down by DDoS, or losing data for millions of their users, will push other companies to act.
Most notably, we can expect investments to focus on best practices to proactively reduce risk and prevent downtime, as organizations recognize what’s at stake. Those in industries most likely to be targeted, such as hospitality and gaming, will need to shore up their defense in depth strategy, combining endpoint protection, network segmentation, protective DNS, and zero trust mechanisms to reduce their exposure to sophisticated attacks.
While the first part of 2024 will see a rise in successful cyberattacks as direct result of those that reduced cybersecurity investments in 2023, the promising economic growth forecasted for 2024 will allow enterprises to reprioritize security spending and we can expect the increase in successful attacks to subside by mid-year.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos is the Senior Vice President of Solutions for Vercara responsible for product management of Vercara’s portfolio of application security, DNS, and threat data services. He is tasked with managing a senior group of product managers, defining product strategy, product requirements, roadmaps, and overseeing the release process to create service differentiation and accelerate growth. His role also includes helping to define strategy for security acquisitions and execution of strategic partnerships. He also has responsibility for development, enablement, and growth of the solutions engineering organization for the company. Before taking the SVP of Solutions role, he was previously CTO of the Security Solutions business unit within Neustar.
