[INFOGRAPHIC] What Is the Hidden Cost of Security?

With less than six months until 2020, experts forecast the industry will be struggling to secure over 20 billion devices from attacks. Cybercrime will never cease to be a money-making machine, with hackers already making trillions of dollars from stealing sensitive data, medical records, financial information and credit history.

And while hackers improve their methods, organizations still don’t understand all the vulnerabilities, gaps and misconfigurations in their IT infrastructure. The global skill shortage leaves millions of jobs unfilled, a major roadblock that businesses need to resolve as soon as possible. Industry research shows that, while 50 percent of global data breaches are caused by malicious or criminal attacks, some 20 percent are the result of human error or system misconfigurations.

Enterprises fail to understand that cyberattacks are no longer a matter of if, but when. So they must not be caught off guard. In the next two years, companies face a 28 percent chance of a recurring material breach. Most firms have inadequate protection. They use software from multiple vendors and usually take over 6 months to identify and contain a breach, leading to the high cost of data breaches. When calculating the total cost of security, senior managers only look at the cost of software, forgetting to include the hidden costs associated with slow incident response, the global skill shortage, and the considerable expense of security operations.

Check out our infographic below to see what to expect from data breaches in the near future.

For more information about how you can reduce costs, reach out to the Bitdefender team for a free endpoint security Total Cost of Ownership assessment.