Pitch It in Numbers — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

The people who approve a security budget, the board, the CEO and the executive team, mostly think in numbers. A business exists to make a profit, and even a non-profit needs money to carry out its mission. Profit = revenue − expense. So a security project can help in only two ways: - raise revenue: meet or exceed what customers demand, win a client or a market, advertise better protection than a competitor - cut expense: reduce risk, like insurance, so less is lost to incidents, outages, staff time and premiums The project itself costs money, and that cost is an expense too. What it does to profit is the revenue it adds plus the expense it removes, less what it costs. A $40,000 project that wins $120,000 of new sales and avoids $30,000 of breach costs changes profit by $120,000 + $30,000 − $40,000 = $110,000. A project that costs more than it adds lowers profit. That is a hard pitch on its own, so it needs a cheaper option or a second argument. A breach works the other way round: $500,000 of cleanup, legal and notification costs can turn a year's profit into a loss, which is why reducing risk counts as cutting expense.

What you'll learn

Calculate a company's profit as revenue minus expense, before and after a security project
Work out how much a security project changes yearly profit, through new revenue, reduced expense or both, less its own cost
Work the profit formula back to the savings or revenue a project needs, and compare two pitches by what they add to profit

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.1 Compare and contrast security implications of different architecture models.

Key terms

Cost-Benefit Analysis: A financial evaluation method that compares the costs of implementing a solution against the benefits it produces to support decision-making.
Risk Reduction: A risk response strategy that takes steps to decrease the probability or impact of a risk.
Risk: The potential for loss or harm resulting from a threat exploiting a vulnerability.
Multi-Factor Authentication: An authentication method that requires users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access.

Topics

Interactive Calculation

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