Boosting the impact of your security budget
29th January 2025 • Scandic Grand Central Hotel, Helsinki, Finland
At the frontline of geopolitical friction, how can CISOs demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency?
More spending announced on cybersecurity and on AI-linked solutions
On April 30 (though announced later), a massive data breach of the City of Helsinki resulted in the leak of tens of millions of files from the city's internal network. The stolen files included the personal data of up to 150,000 schoolchildren and their guardians. It also included information on all of the City's 38,000 staff members.
A data security expert from Traficom's National Cyber Security Centre, Matias Mesilä, described Helsinki's massive data leak as "possibly the largest data breach affecting [Finland's] municipal sector".
Helsinki City Manager Jukka-Pekka Ujula said, "We're talking about tens of millions of documents, which of course means an extensive amount of materials that may have fallen into the wrong hands."
This attack reinforces the message that Finland, its public sector and its private sector are prime targets for both politically and financially motivated attackers.
That is why government budgets for cybersecurity rose 30% in 2024 and is forecast to rise again in 2025.
But how can organisations be sure that they getting value for money from their security spends at a time of economic uncertainty?
Too many firms have too many security solutions that are not being fully utilised and so the challenge is to build more efficient security stacks. CISOs must be able to define security priorities and demonstrate that current spend delivers these without duplication and under-utilization in their security technology.
They must also look at removing complexity – and so the likelihood of human error – from bloated and overlapping stacks. If core hygiene and human error cause most breaches, then do you need multiple best-of-breed point solutions, or a simpler, but better utilised all-rounder?
Come to the e-Crime & Cybersecurity Congress Nordics to find out:
• How your fellow security professionals are coping with these challenges day-to-day?
• Does NIS2 help and what must you do to incorporate its requirements?
• What practical steps you can take to get better supplier visibility and understanding?
• How to economically enhance the security built into Cloud infrastructure and applications with selected additional technologies.
• How new and not-so-new EU Directives are driving the Board view of cybersecurity risk and investment.