Breaches are a fact of life for every business. However, it is possible to stop breaches and improve your security posture by taking a proactive approach to your incident response (IR) strategy.

The Risk of a Cyber Security Breach Continues to Increase

Consider: A joint study by Ponemon Institute and IBM Security revealed the percentage chance of an organization to experience a data breach within two years was 29.6 percent in 2019, an increase from 27.9 percent in 2018.

Cost of a Data Breach

As the risk of a breach increases, so does the financial impact. The same study states the average cost of a breach in the U.S. is $8.19 million, more than double the worldwide average. The largest cost of a data breach is due to lost business resulting from customer attrition.

Average Time to Identify and Contain a Breach

According to the Ponemon Institute, the average time to identify and contain a breach is 279 days, representing a 4.9 percent increase over the 2018 breach lifecycle of 266 days.

Fast Incident Response Saves Money

Breaches with a lifecycle less than 200 days were on average $1.22 million less costly than breaches with a lifecycle of more than 200 days ($3.34 million vs. $4.56 million respectively), a difference of 37 percent.

In other words, your likelihood of getting hit with a breach is high and increasing steadily. The faster you identify and contain that breach, the lower your costs.

Most Businesses Aren’t Prepared for a Breach

Despite these realities, most companies – about 77% – don’t have a breach response plan.

It can be difficult to navigate a market saturated with a variety of security tools and services. Building a breach prevention and mitigation plan is daunting. Many businesses don’t know who to contact when a breach occurs, increasing the breach lifecycle and associated costs.

Improve Your Business’s Incident Response Preparedness

Accordingly, it’s more important than ever to implement proactive incident response strategies into your operation to reduce the overall impact of an incident.

What can you do to take a proactive approach to incident response?

Plan for the Inevitable

Assume that you will be breached and put plans in motion to prepare for that inevitable cyber incident. The CRITICALSTART team has found that 40% of all managed detection and response (MDR) customers in the deployment phase had already experienced a breach.

Add an IR Retainer to Your Incident Response Program

With an IR retainer, you’ll gain the benefit of partnering with a team of experts who can help perform tabletop exercises and simulations to evaluate and shorten response time.

The dwell time between finding out you’ve been breached and selecting and onboarding an IR team can cost your organization time, money, and brand reputation.

Get Proactive with CRITICALSTART’s IR Retainer

CRITICALSTART offers incident response (IR) retainers, meaning you’re always covered.

You’ll get immediate access to our TEAMARES IR cybersecurity professionals who stand ready to investigate, contain, eradicate, and remediate your breach.

Find the IR Retainer Package That’s Right for Your Business

We offer several prepaid retainer packages to meet your unique business needs. And our IR retainers are flexible – you may repurpose unused hours and apply them to other IR and cybersecurity consulting service engagements.

An IR retainer can help you:

• Respond immediately to a breach within minutes, not hours or days.
• Improve your security posture, securing funds for immediate incident response remediation.
• Save money by securing IR services now, at a lower cost, than if purchased at the time of an incident.
• Protect your assets 24/7/365 by stopping an attacker’s deep dive into your critical data.

Don’t wait for a breach – be proactive and add an IR retainer to your IR program. For details, contact us today.