You may think of real estate, stocks or the newest technology startups when you think of smart investments. There is another type of investment that offers immediate and long-term benefits cybersecurity. This investment is crucial to protect businesses from costly cyberattacks, and helps them avoid costly penalties and losing trust from customers.

As digital transformation transforms business operations, enterprises are creating and manipulating an ever-growing volume of data that must be managed effectively across complex computing environments. These environments frequently span cloud data centers, enterprise data centers, and numerous connected devices including Internet of Things sensors and robots. This increased complexity creates a greater attack surface which makes it difficult to protect important information from compromise and loss.

In addition to the financial costs Data breaches can also damage business growth through strategic digital initiatives a company’s reputation and lead to long-term losses in sales. Recent research showed that the average cost for the data breach was $4 million. This is a huge impact on any organization. In addition, regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and the General Data Protection Regulation impose steep fines on companies that do not meet the strictest security standards.

In today’s competitive economy security is a must. is essential to achieving growth. A pound of prevention is worth a pound cure, and it’s far more cost-effective to invest in preventative measures instead of having to pay for cleanup and recovery after an incident. By implementing the right tools and technologies, companies can ensure that their data is secure in transit, at rest and in the middle by implementing encryption, paying attention to the human firewall and performing regular deep checks.