How Much Should Your Business Actually Spend on Cybersecurity?

The wrong question

Asking 'what do companies like us spend?' produces a number, not protection. Benchmarks — commonly 5 to 10 percent of IT budget — tell you nothing about your actual exposure. A trading company moving millions through email-driven payments and a design studio with no sensitive data might be the same size, yet their risk profiles are worlds apart.

Start from impact, not averages

A better starting point is three honest numbers. First: what does a day of downtime cost you in lost revenue, idle staff and penalties? Second: what would losing or leaking your most sensitive data cost — including regulatory exposure under PDPL and the customer trust you'd burn? Third: how much cash could a successful payment fraud extract before anyone noticed? Security budget is insurance priced against those numbers, and suddenly the conversation becomes rational.

Where the first dirham goes furthest

The encouraging news: the controls that stop the majority of real-world attacks are the cheapest ones. Multi-factor authentication, patched systems, tested backups, email filtering and basic staff training defeat most opportunistic attacks — and opportunistic attacks are most attacks. A small business can be defensibly secure for a few thousand dirhams a month. What's expensive is recovering without those basics: average breach costs run into hundreds of thousands.

When to scale up

Spend more when your risk genuinely grows: you take on enterprise clients who audit your security, you fall under regulatory regimes, you run customer-facing platforms, or downtime starts costing real money per hour. That's when 24/7 monitoring, penetration testing and formal security programs earn their keep. The right path is stepwise — close the basics first, then add layers as the business justifies them.

Our free assessment gives you exactly this picture for your own business: what an incident would cost you, where your gaps are, and what closing them — in priority order — would actually cost.