Home > Advanced Topics > Cybersecurity > White Papers > Building Your Cybersecurity Roadmap for Mid-Market and Growth-Oriented Companies > Business challenge
Across the world, many people are striving to create success. They are fighting hard to grow their organization, create value, solve customer challenges, and fulfill their mission. Others, however, are trying to infiltrate, cause disruption, hijack, steal, and hold organizations hostage so that they too can fulfill their mission. Mid-market and growth-oriented companies are uniquely vulnerable to cyber attacks, and one mistake can cost an organization its brand reputation, prevent it from operating, or cost it millions of dollars in expenses. In today’s defensive-based cybersecurity landscape, bad actors are very much aware of those vulnerabilities and have invested time and effort into streamlining efficiencies for successful attacks.
The most common types of these attacks include phishing and social engineering attacks, data breaches and theft of information, ransomware attacks, insider threats, unsecured or misconfigured cloud services, and inadequate security measures or solutions. A lack of continuous monitoring and an incident response plan causes even more pain in total downtime, recovery, and resuming normal business operations.
Cyber attacks are a top risk for organizations and have increased by 600 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Almost half of all cyber attacks target smaller organizations, which attackers know are significantly vulnerable. By 2025, cybercrime will cost an estimated $10.5 trillion, at a growth rate of 15 percent year over year (2020, Morgan, S., Cybercrime Magazine). Primarily malware and ransomware, which, in 2020, increased by 358 and 435 percent respectively (2022, World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022). These bad actors have attacked both large and small organizations and left a trail of companies struggling to recover and others closed for good.
In addition to these threats, business leaders face multiple challenges including remote and hybrid workers, supply chain and vendor security, and evolving regulatory issues. They are also concerned with securing their growing customer base, protecting their intellectual property, and reducing cyber risk to an acceptable level for stakeholders.
To create an effective cybersecurity roadmap, cybersecurity professionals must first understand the common and unique challenges facing their organization as well as the specific information they must have before development ensues. Because of the breadth and depth of cybersecurity (it touches everything in an organization), cybersecurity professionals must consider not only the technical security requirements but also business, financial, operational, compliance, and integration requirements.