How Much Can Application Isolation Save Your Organization?

by Jessica Morales on October 9, 2018

How many times a day do each of your users click on a link to an unknown website? Or open an email attachment from an external sender?
Bromium’s new risk assessment calculator highlights the your costs savings associated with reducing risk by isolating risky activities.
The Risk Assessment calculator is available on the Bromium website.

Many security breaches start the same: a user clicks on something that looks perfectly benign, and most of the time, nothing would happen right away. Even if malware is present inside an attachment, a link, or a downloaded file, it might infect the endpoint and then lay dormant, waiting for an opportunity to strike. And when it does, pandemonium. An attack could cripple your computer systems, ransomware might lock access to all files until a payment is made, or infected PCs may get completely wiped out, rendering them useless. After an attack is identified, a culprit is located, and specific vulnerability pinpointed, the security team begins painstakingly patching and rebuilding, hoping to restore order as quickly as possible.

How much does all this cost an organization? Can you really quantify the damage, extra work, overtime put in by the IT team, and the loss of productivity by the office workers whose computers went blank? Some of these costs can be estimated, extrapolated from others’ experiences, or glimpsed from industry research. Yet, certain aspects of dealing with a cyber attack can actually be calculated with some certainty, using data collected from industry research and analysis.

For instance, we know that between clicking on emails from untrusted sources, downloading software from the web, and clicking on external links, an average employee engages in about 11 risky activities every day. For an organization with 1,000 employees, that’s 324,000 end-user activities every month that could potentially introduce malware to the system. We also know $468 is the average cost of remediation per device, which includes employee loss of productivity and time to re-image or remediate the threat, and that 1 percent of threats continue to slip through layered defenses.

So, if you are still relying on detection alone, we can predict with some accuracy how much breaches are costing your organization. Try out the risk assessment calculator to see how email attachments, web links and software downloads are impacting your risk.

Have questions about the ROI? Contact us or request a product demo.