Early Breach Detection Lowers Costs

According to a March and McLennan study (Cyber Risk in Asia Pacific), Asian firms take 1.7 times longer to discover a data breach.

MMC Cyber risk in Asia Pacific
MMC Cyber risk in Asia Pacific

In addition, IBM Security and Ponemon Institute computes the average total cost of data breach at USD 141 per lost or stolen record.

The study also showed a strong relationship between mean time to detection (MTTI)  and the cost of each data breach. The good news, if we can call them that, is that the worldwide average breach detection time has improved from 201 days in 2016 to 190 days in 2017.

However, this is still far from the ideal 100 days mean time to breach detection.  The graph below shows that the longer a company takes to discover a data breach, the higher the associated cost to contain it later on.

Breach Detection and Average total costs

So one key goal of your company’s security framework would be to shorten cyber breach detection times.  One common way seasoned network admins do this is via SNMP monitoring of all network and server devices.

Then they also add SIEM capabilities (Security Incident and Events Monitoring). By correlating SNMP, syslog and SIEM data together, it will be easier for network guys to detect breaches in a shorter time.