You may think of real estate, stocks or the newest tech startups when you think of smart investments. However, there’s another type of investment that offers both immediate and long-term benefits cybersecurity. This essential investment helps protect businesses from costly cyberattacks and can help them avoid costly penalties and loss of confidence from customers.

As digital transformation transforms business operations, enterprises are creating, manipulating and storing an ever-increasing amount of data which must be effectively managed across complex computing environments. These environments typically span cloud, enterprise data centers and many connected devices, including Internet of Things sensors and robots. This increased complexity results in an greater attack surface, which makes important information more susceptible to being hacked and lost.

In addition to the financial costs of data breaches, they could also harm a company’s reputation and cause long-term sales losses. Recent research showed that the average cost for a data breach was $4 million. This is an enormous impact for any company. Regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act or the General Data Protection Regulation also apply severe penalties to companies who do not adhere to strict security standards.

In today’s world of competitiveness security is a must. is crucial to gaining traction. It’s cheaper to invest in preventative measures instead of paying for the cleanup and recovery following the event of a how to protect ownership of companies security breach. By implementing the appropriate tools and technologies, companies can ensure their information is safe during transit, at rest and in between by implementing encryption, focusing on the human firewall and regularly conducting deep checks.