Here's a fact: On average, it takes companies nearly half a year to identify a cyber security breach. 
Here's another fact: Research shows that breaches that take over 30 days to contain cost an average of $1 million more than those contained within the first month.

Taken together, it's pretty clear that there's a lot more work to be done to rapidly speed up incident detection and response times. Let's break this down a bit.

For the most part, the concept of hiring an independent team of security technicians, aside from or in parallel with the general IT department, is still gaining traction. More likely, responsibility for cyber security is bundled together with the rest of IT and given over to an already overworked team of programmers. The result? An undertrained and overwhelmed IT department lacking the tools, expertise, or guidance to properly monitor a sprawling corporate network. Well, no wonder it takes 197 days to detect a breach.

On the other hand, the solution can't be to simply hire new staff. There are legitimate concerns that have led to the cyber security crisis we are currently faced with. For starters, security experts can be extremely expensive and in high demand. For many small and medium sized businesses, then, they simply aren't in a position to financially compete with larger firms to attract the available talent. At Silent Breach, we firmly believe that a good cyber security solution needs to be widely available and affordable. Otherwise, it turns into the zero-sum game of survival of the fittest (which in this case translates to 'the wealthiest').

To compound this problem, cyber security is by its very nature vastly undervalued in terms of its financial impact. As opposed to most other areas of an organization, an effective cyber strategy is one in which there's nothing to report. This makes it incredibly difficult for the security team to justify an increased budget or an investment in a robust external pen test schedule. If you're lucky enough to even have a CISO (what just may be the least understood C-Suite executive), chances are that their voice is being drowned out by a barrage of budgeting issues, business requirements, and marketing campaigns.

One solution? Continuous monitoring.

The past decade has seen the meteoric rise of various SaaS applications, and cyber security is no exception. Now, with products like Quantum Armor, you can monitor dozens of applications and thousands of endpoints with a simple subscription model. To put it in other terms, for the cost of a junior developer, you can have real-time port & configuration monitoring, log parsing, threat forecasting and emerging cybersecurity trends bundled up and delivered to you each day, all before you've finished your morning coffee. If that sounds like a great deal, it's because it is.

While this is certainly not a fix-all solution, it can provide a cost-efficient and scalable baseline for your security strategy. For those ready to go one further, managed security services providers can now handle everything from identity and access management to incident response so that you can focus on what really matters, growing your business.

This way, next time you're faced with a cyber threat, you'll always be prepared.