If Cybersecurity Feels Like a Waste of Money, Your Keys Are Still in the Front Door

If cybersecurity sometimes feels like a waste of money, you’re not alone. Many organizations quietly share this view and simply hope nothing happens. In today’s economy—where it costs more to generate every new dollar of revenue—cybersecurity often slips to the bottom of the priority list.

This is how organizations unintentionally leave the keys in the front door.

But think of your business like a physical bank. Would you leave keys in the front door, or tape the alarm code beside the keypad? That’s essentially what happens when cybersecurity gets deprioritized. Meanwhile, cybercrime is now the world’s third-largest economy, behind only the United States and China. 

Cyber Criminals Know What Your Data is Worth, Do You?

Organizations invest heavily to win customers. Recent studies show customer acquisition costs (CAC) ranging from $281 to $1,100+ depending on industry. Once acquired, a customer’s data becomes part of your business cycle—a measurable digital asset Wharton recognizes, Deloitte calls strategic, and many economists consider an organization’s most valuable asset.

But customer records aren’t the only data with real financial weight. Your intellectual property (IP), trade secrets, pricing models, formulas, proprietary algorithms, product roadmaps, and internal research represent the true crown jewels of enterprise value. IP theft often creates far greater data breach cost exposure than customer records because it erodes competitive advantage, compresses margins, accelerates displacement, and impacts valuation multiples.

Cybercriminals understand this perfectly. They treat your data like commodities in a marketplace:

• Business email credentials: $10–$50,

  
  

• Full company database dump: $500–$50,000+,

  
  

• Network access: $100–$1,000, and

  
  

• Credit card details: $5–$30.

  
  

If you don’t know what your data is worth, attackers will value it for you.

When Real Companies Learn the Hard Way Cybersecurity is Not a Waste of Money

I consistently meet organizations that believe their internal teams “have cybersecurity handled”—until they don’t. These are mainstream organizations in finance, manufacturing, professional services, and technology.

• A transfer agent wired funds to a fraudulent account after a cybercriminal altered routing and account numbers—and was later sued by its client.

  
  

• A leadership team believed “everything was locked down,” yet suffered a quiet, weeks-long data exfiltration.

  
  

• New employees received fake emails from “the CEO” requesting $600 gift card purchases—a classic social-engineering failure.

  
  

• An industrial firm discovered its own senior managers were exfiltrating customer data to a competitor who promised them future roles.

  
  

According to the 2024 Verizon DBIR,

• 68% of breaches involve the human element—insiders, social engineering, or errors, and

  
  

• 28% stem from poor system management, such as unpatched vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.

  
  

These failures weren’t sophisticated. They were preventable governance breakdowns.

If You Aren’t Using Risk Management, You Don’t Know Who Has the Keys to Your Front Door

Most organizations still treat cybersecurity as a technical function rather than what it truly is: a business risk. Tools, vendors, and IT support cannot protect what leadership hasn’t defined, prioritized, or governed. Effective cybersecurity starts with risk management.

Risk management forces leaders to:

• identify what matters,

  
  

• quantify exposure,

  
  

• prioritize risk, and

  
  

• align controls with business impact.

This is not an IT workflow—it’s a board-level responsibility.

According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost per compromised record is $165, and for an organization with 10,000 customer records, breach exposure starts in the million-dollar range, before adding:

• regulatory penalties,

  
  

• legal fees,

  
  

• business interruption, and

  
  

• reputational damage.

  
  

Regulatory regimes add even more weight:

• GDPR: €10M–€20M or 2–4% of global revenue

  
  

• CCPA/CPRA: $2,500–$7,500 per record

  
  

• HIPAA: up to $1.5M per violation category

  
  

• SEC: enforcement for unreported cyber risk

  
  

• NYDFS: penalties for weak cybersecurity governance

These aren’t theoretical. They’re risk variables.

Without data classification, organizations don’t know:

• what they hold,

  
  

• where it lives,

  
  

• who has access, or

  
  

• which regulatory regimes apply.

If you can’t classify it, you can’t protect it—and you definitely can’t price the risk.

And without this discipline, companies confuse activity with security. They deploy tools they don’t need, underfund what matters, and guess at true exposure. The 2025 IT and Security Tool Sprawl Report, shows:

• 64% have too many tools,

  
  

• 54% say tools increase friction, and

  
  

• nearly 50% don’t know if their tools reduce risk.

  
  

When everything is a priority, nothing is—and that’s how keys end up in the wrong hands. 

Read our post “Security Control Readiness: More Levers ≄ More Protection” for further perspective.

What Leadership Must Do Right Now

Cyber risk isn’t an IT problem—it’s a leadership responsibility. Security only works when it aligns with business priorities, and that alignment comes from risk management, not technology.

1. Classify Your Data: Know what you hold, where it lives, who touches it, and what laws govern it.

2. Prioritize Risks Based on Business Impact: Rank risks by how they affect revenue, operations, customers, and valuation.

3. Align Controls to the Risks That Matter: Controls must match cost, friction, effectiveness, and real business needs.

4. Assign Ownership: Leadership owns risk. IT executes. Governance verifies outcomes.

This is how you finally understand who has the keys to your front door—and how to take them back.

Read our post “Cybersecurity Governance: Why Leadership Can’t Delegate Accountability” for further perspective.

Take the Keys Back: What You Should Do Next

If you can’t answer these questions with confidence:

• What are our most valuable assets?

  
  

• Which risks could materially harm the business?

  
  

• What would a breach actually cost us?

  
  

• Which controls reduce the most risk for the least friction?

  
  

• Who truly owns cyber risk internally?

Then your organization is operating on assumption, not governance—and assumption is what attackers count on.

If you’re ready to shift from hope to clarity, from tools to governance, and from noise to measurable risk reduction, see our About page and learn how BravoCheck’s cross-functional approach, and certifications across cybersecurity disciplines can help.

Let’s identify your real exposure, prioritize what matters most, and build a risk-management foundation that actually protects your business.