Cybersecurity incidents can generate damages of up to EUR 1 million for Romanian companies in the first year from the event

The accelerated growth of digitalization in recent years has brought many benefits and also significant risks. Of these, the risk of a cyber-attack is perhaps the highest, with substantial negative consequences for any organization, regardless of size or field of activity.

The average cost of a security breach reached over 4 million euro in 2022 globally, according to a report by IBM and Ponemon Institute, and will most likely increase in 2023, continuing the trend seen in the past years. In Romania, looking at recent situations in which Bit Sentinel specialists have been involved, the cost of remediating security incidents for companies that did not have cyber protection systems and procedures in place starts at 50,000 euro and can reach up to 1 million euro in just the first year after the attack.

At the same time, the real cost of implementing outsourced Security Operations Center services – also known as Security Operations Center as a Service, or SOCaaS – which are highly effective in helping organizations identify cyber attacks, is usually as much as 60 times lower, according to experts at Bit Sentinel, a leading Central and Eastern European company specialized in providing professional cyber security services.

“The impact of cyber threats can no longer be neglected by companies, and ensuring the security of infrastructures is a growing challenge, regardless of size or industry. Unfortunately, most companies behave reactively in these situations. In such cases, in addition to the operational and reputational losses caused by information leakage and business disruption, restoring security involves considerable additional investments. The financial impact of a successful attack will therefore be huge, and the organization will have to fight long afterward to repair its reputation and regain the trust of customers and partners. To avoid such consequences, SOCaaS will be the best option for monitoring, alerting, investigation, and support during an incident, and to cover key cyber security processes as well. At the same time, outsourcing a security operations center will also help reduce the time an incident is identified and mitigated before causing damage to IT systems”, said Andrei Avădănei, CEO of Bit Sentinel.

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Incident remediation costs may include additional costs arising from the lack of compliance with national or international regulations – for example, lack of compliance with the GDPR or the NIS and NIS2 Directives. For organizations operating industrial systems, such as the ones for automation, warehousing, transport, energy supply, and water, the costs can even exceed the international average.

SOCaaS services become even more relevant as 83% of organizations globally have had at least one data leak, and 60% of those leaks have resulted in higher prices charged to consumers, according to a report by IBM and Ponemon Institute.

Bit Sentinel offers SOCaaS services tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized companies that have moderate activity and lack large security budgets, as well as large companies looking to offload efforts from internal teams to focus on other key areas. Outsourcing such activities has a positive effect on all the operational resources involved: time, specialists, and costs. In other words, a company benefits from uninterrupted services from experts identifying, remediating, and responding in real-time to cyber security incidents, at prices that fit the size of the business.

“As we see in the market, an in-house security operations center (SOC) does not always succeed in fully meeting an organization’s prevention needs. On the one hand, cybersecurity specialists are very hard to find and retention methods are expensive. Moreover, members of an in-house SOC are part of an extended security team, so they have a limited schedule in which they have to deal with other tasks and often do not deal with all the alerts they receive, thus creating vulnerability for the company. One solution to these problems is to outsource SOC services in the form of SOCaaS, which, despite expectations, comes at a much more advantageous cost compared to having an in-house department. In addition, a dedicated team of experts will focus only on the organization’s cybersecurity needs, enabling them to continuously monitor, identify and prevent any risks, early and effectively. A SOCaaS is dedicated to all companies that want to ensure their data security, from SMEs to companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees. It can be tailored to needs, technologies used, or budgets. We believe that cybersecurity services are fundamental for any company, so they should be as affordable as possible, especially in terms of costs”, added Andrei Avădănei.

Through SOCaaS, companies can benefit from the services of a highly trained security team and advanced cloud-based monitoring and security services, that are always on, to identify and prevent attacks. In addition, any organization has access to appropriate data protection and, where necessary, recovery processes, as well as regular training programs for employees to help them identify and report cyber threats, thus effectively minimizing vulnerabilities.

Bit Sentinel launched the BSS-CERT division in 2020, one of the first SOCaaS centers available to organizations in all industries that need comprehensive security incident detection, protection, and response systems. Among the solutions Bit Sentinel integrates into its SOCaaS service are those from big names such as Microsoft, Google, Fortinet, Cisco, VMware, and many others.