Securing assets and data has become increasingly difficult for today’s global organizations. The combined complexity of distributed and disparate environments, manual processes, and an obscured view of the attack surface work against security teams – and tip the odds in the criminals’ favor. Increasing compliance and regulatory requirements only compound the challenges.
As security teams struggle to mitigate cyber risk and close security gaps, the need for a 360-degree view across their entire IT and OT environments, including cloud and multi-cloud domains, becomes clear.
Skybox has given us visibility across our network and there’s no other tool that we’ve had in the past that allowed us to do that on a global scale.” –
Principal Network Engineer
| IT Security Company
Implementing the Skybox platform, which applies infrastructure context and threat intelligence, enables organizations to improve security policy management and unlock visibility into their entire attack surface that spans informational technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and hybrid cloud environments. This allows enterprise networking, cloud, security, and risk teams to comply with corporate and regulatory policies, reduce misconfigurations, improve cyber hygiene, automate security changes, and prioritize remediation of the riskiest vulnerabilities.
These capabilities help our customers decrease risk and improve productivity for vulnerability management, audit, and compliance processes. But how do these advantages translate to the financial value of deploying the Skybox platform?
Skybox enables cost savings and business benefits at a net present value of 2.21M
To find out, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study of our Skybox Security Posture Management Platform. The analysis revealed that a composite customer earned an estimated 142% return on their investment (ROI) over three years.
Forrester interviewed four real-world Skybox customers across multiple industries and aggregated the insights into a single composite organization. The resulting organization reflects the profile of a global enterprise that generates $2B+ in revenue annually with 15,0000 employees and 30,000 assets. The sheer volume of assets, combined with an explosion of new vulnerabilities (more than 20,000 OT vulnerabilities in 2021 alone), illustrates the core challenges that so many companies face today.
In addition to providing industry-first technology benefits, Forrester concluded that organizations deploying the Skybox platform experience significant economic impact. The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization may experience benefits of $3.78M over three years versus costs of $1.56M – representing a net present value (NPV) of $2.21M.
Skybox reduces the risk of a data breach by 55%
By leveraging Skybox’s capabilities to prioritize and remediate exposed vulnerabilities and address compliance concerns, the composite organization reduces risks from internal and external threats. Overall, companies saw more than a 55% reduction in the risk of significant security breaches from most external and internal threats.
Skybox customers shared that their companies were able to drastically reduce their exposure to significant data breaches resulting from internal and external threat actors. Using Skybox’s capabilities, organizations could better prioritize and understand critical vulnerabilities while addressing compliance concerns on a global enterprise scale. Through increased visibility, interviewees’ companies acted on critical items more quickly across IT and OT functions.
It was like the Wild West. We have thousands upon thousands or hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities that show up in scans. What Skybox does is look at vulnerabilities in the context of all the other things in the network to [produce] a risk assessment, and that’s what allows us to prioritize the vulnerabilities that need to be fixed.” –
Principal engineer
| IT security company
With a consistent framework for prioritizing exposed vulnerabilities, Skybox customers created an internal governance process to centrally review and manage threats across IT and OT environments. This led to a 67% reduction in the time to detect and remediate vulnerabilities. A manufacturing company saw a reduction from two months to a few days on the IT side of its business and from nine months to as low as two weeks for OT.
Beyond the threat of an external attack, companies were able to leverage network segmentation strategies to limit the risk of internal dangers as well. The principal network engineer at the IT security company shared that they had realized a 200% improvement in their ability to address internal attack vectors: “We’ve been able to use Skybox as a tool to limit movement once a threat is inside the network, to limit where it can go.”
Skybox platform enables technology consolidation
Another interesting outcome of the study was the opportunity for companies to consolidate the technologies within their security stack, leading to significant gains. After implementing the Skybox platform, customers were able to decommission or downgrade other regional or enterprise tools related to vulnerability, firewall, and network policy management as well as reporting and analytics toolsets. The composite organization yielded a projected three-year, risk-adjusted total present value of $329,200.
Additional benefits and cost savings
The TEI study also uncovered further benefits for Skybox customers including:
- An improved understanding and management of critical threats enables organizations to streamline and plan for maintenance and address open vulnerabilities, which decreases downtime for mission-critical assets by 50% and the associated revenue leakage.
- Expanded visibility, automation, and vulnerability prioritization increase the efficiency of security operations teams by 20%.
- Improved processes, data, and reporting reduce compliance violations and decrease reliance on external auditors by 50%.
- Improved security analyst productivity by 30% when conducting audit and compliance activities
Making the business case for security posture management
The business impact of successful risk-based security posture management—versus the old status-quo, detect-and-respond approach to cybersecurity—is hard to overstate. By preventing or mitigating breaches, risk-based methods and integrated security posture management can save companies many millions of dollars per year and prevent untold damage to reputation, customer trust, company morale, market standing, and competitiveness. In extreme cases, it may make the difference between the survival and extinction of the company itself. By improving efficiencies and reducing workloads, automated risk-based solutions like ours can help you trim costs while accomplishing more—boosting productivity in a time of tight resources and economic instability.
Contact sales to learn how Skybox can reduce your cyber risk while also saving you time and money.
