The Business
This example considers a business that provides real-time video-on-demand to consumers. The business relies entirely on the internet and has a £76 million turnover in a highly competitive market. Activity is constant but has predictable peaks in demand during evenings and week-ends.
This is a business that highly susceptible and sensitive to a loss of cyber functionality.
The Business Impact
The business turnover is currently £76 million annually. That averages out at over £200,000 per day, although in practice this is greater at weekends. Even a partial failure will have long-term implications as the video-on-demand market is highly competitive.
[Ponemon2015d] details the cost components for a cyber attack. Revenue loss is placed at 21% of the overall cost of a vulnerability being exploited, with business disruption placed highest at 39%. Obviously this is dependent on the business.
Whilst a loss of data has an obvious cost, what about a loss of availability? How will it impact the business?
Illustration 1 shows the business loss for an enterprise which has threats capable of disrupting the business. The right-hand indicator provides the intelligence on the business impact of potential threats. Again, the level of threat can be specified, easy, medium or difficult.
The meter shows the spot impact to your business after 1 week. In this case, if the threat is not remedied, by 168 hours the business will be losing 47% of its turnover.
Provided in the narrative text underneath the meter, PG also provides a turnover figure for 24, 48 and 168 hours. As per the previous example, by drilling down into the system detail (provided in a tabular view) vital intelligence is provided allowing the loss of availability to be avoided.
Illustration 2 provides the detailed drill-down view for the loss of availability. In this case one system is susceptible and needs remediation. The business loss over 7 days is given.
The Value of Predictive Intelligence
A loss of availability, even if partial, is devastating. It is not just the loss of business at the time, but it encourages client churn – especially in a competitive environment.
For our example business, a days outage has an immediate impact of £200,000 per day. This is the direct loss of business and excludes customer churn, reputation damage and loss of business value.
The power of predictive actionable intelligence meant these losses could be avoided.
Bibliography
Ponemon2015c: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: United Kingdom, 2015
Ponemon2015a: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis, 2015
Ponemon2015b: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study 2015, 2015
NTT2015a: NTT Group, 2015 Global Threat Intelligence Report, 2015
Verizon2015a: Verizon, 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, 2015
Ponemon2015d: Ponemon Institute, 2015 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: Global, 2015
SunTzua: Sun-tzu, The Art of War, , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War