What is ROSI (Return on Security Investment)

The term return on investment (ROI) refers to the value derived from an investment. If an investment has a high ROI, then it provides more value to the organization than another investment of the same amount but with a lower ROI.

Return on Security Investment (ROSI) specifically measures the ROI of investments in cybersecurity initiatives. Security investment is essential for an organization, but many security teams struggle to quantify the benefits derived from it.

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What is ROSI (Return on Security Investment)

Why Is It Essential to Measure ROSI?

Companies face a wide variety of cybersecurity threats, including ransomware and supply chain attacks. While the organization may acknowledge that some security investment is necessary to manage cyber risk and prevent cyberattacks, it may be difficult to determine where to invest or for a security lead to demonstrate the positive impacts of past investments.

Quantifying the value of cybersecurity is important for a few different reasons, including:

 

  • Justifying Past Investments: By measuring the ROSI of past security investments, security leads can demonstrate to management and the board that money was well spent.
  • Proving the Need for Future Investment: Calculating the potential ROSI of proposed security investments can help make a case for future investment.

Strategic Security Investment: Comparing the ROSI of various proposed investments can help executives choose the solutions that offer the greatest potential benefit to the organization.

How is ROSI Calculated?

ROSI measures the benefit that security investment brings to the organization. In general, this can be calculated as

RoSI = (Benefits of Security Investment – Cost of Security Investment) / Cost of Security Investment

In this calculation, the cost of a security investment is relatively easy to determine. However, quantifying the potential benefits is more difficult. One way to estimate this is based on the change in the Annual Loss Expectation (ALE) associated with a security investment.

ALE measures the total expected financial losses due to a particular cybersecurity threat each year. It is calculated as

ALE = ARO * SLE

In this equation, ARO stands for the Annual Rate of Occurrence. This is the number of times that a particular type of security incident is expected to occur each year. For example, if an organization faces a 20% chance of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack each year, then it will have an ARO of 0.2 for this security risk. ARO can be estimated based on past cybersecurity data for the organization or for similar companies in its industry.

The other value, Single Loss Expectancy (SLE), measures the total cost of a single instance of this cybersecurity threat to the organization. This value should include both direct costs — costs of remediation, lost productivity, etc. — and indirect costs — lost sales, etc. — to the organization. Like ARO, this can be estimated based on past company or industry data.

After calculating the ALE of a security incident, the benefit of a security solution can be estimated based on the anticipated reduction in the ALE. This can be caused by a decrease in:

  • ARO: A security investment may reduce or eliminate the risk that a particular security incident will occur.
  • SLE: The investment may enable faster remediation or reduce the impact of the security incident, reducing SLE.

By estimating the impact that the investment has on ALE, a security team can calculate ROSI and quantify the benefit that it has to the organization.

Ways to Increase Security Return on Investment

Like any part of the business, the security department should be working to maximize ROI (or ROSI). Some ways to increase ROSI include:

  • Risk Analysis: An organization is likely to see the highest ROSI in areas where it faces the greatest unmanaged cybersecurity risk. Performing a risk assessment can help to identify these areas where the company can achieve the greatest leverage.
  • Strategic Solution Selection: Based on the risk assessment, the organization can identify security solutions that offer the greatest potential ROSI. These solutions might reduce the likelihood of an incident, its impact, or the speed and effectiveness of incident response.
  • Prevention Focus: Prevention is always better than detection and response in cybersecurity. Security solutions that block an attack from occurring eliminate the risk and impact on the organization, while detection and response capabilities only speed remediation after damage has been done.

Enhancing ROSI with Check Point

Maximizing ROSI is essential for the success of a corporate cybersecurity program. One of the most effective ways of doing so is by increasing the efficiency of the corporate security operations center (SOC). By eliminating manual processes and centralizing visibility and control of corporate security tools, an organization decreases the operational expenditure (OpEx) of the corporate SOC.

Check Point Infinity is a unified security architecture focused on enhancing enterprise threat prevention capabilities and ROSI. Learn more about the top four ways to increase ROSI with Check Point Infinity.

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