The average time to detect and contain a data breach is 287 days (212 to detect, 75 to contain). That’s 287 days a cybercriminal is inside your network, wreaking havoc, stealing company information.

On the other side of the coin, what’s the average time it takes for a company to make decisions about improving their cybersecurity and move away from legacy IT infrastructure? I’ll wait. And wait. Still waiting…

While there is no average time, the truth is that most companies are far too slow to act.

Here’s a more important number. This one has a dollar sign in front of it: $170,404. That’s the average cost of a ransomware attack. And if you want to quantify the cost of stagnation at your company, this is a good place to start.

Most conversations around cybersecurity happen within silos. Cyber risk is viewed in a vacuum. This siloed view leaves companies on their back foot, in a place that is reactive versus proactive.

Well, if we just patch this part of our infrastructure over here. Or if we just tighten up our controls around email security. Or, or, or…if we just do this one thing.

At TetherView, we believe that the most effective cybersecurity solutions force companies to take a holistic view of their IT infrastructure. Of course, with so many companies dealing with old legacy IT, more often than not everything in their environment is fragmented. Information technology maintenance, threat monitoring and cloud services cannot effectively work together to stop cyberattacks if they operate independently of one another. IT sprawl means there are multiple entry points for hackers and more potential areas of vulnerability.

When a company’s IT infrastructure is fragmented, we see generally see two outcomes:

1. The company focuses on one part of their network but ignores the rest

2. Paralysis by analysis - the company does nothing because it’s inefficient to analyze risk in each segment of their fragmented IT environment

One way in. One way out.

The best way to transform your legacy IT infrastructure (and avoid paralysis by analysis) is to move to a zero-trust environment. Zero-trust environments provide visibility into everything and only provide your employees (and the bad guys) with one way into your network…and one way out. When you put up a big wall in a zero-trust environment, there aren’t multiple parts of your network to patch. Instead of being viewed in a vacuum, cyber risk is seen in its entirety with one clean, comprehensive view. So if the bad guys do happen to get in and breach your network, it’s a lot easier to detect and ultimately trap them before they do any real damage.

Don’t fall victim to paralysis by analysis. The action you need to take to improve your organization’s cybersecurity is clear: Lose the sprawl in your IT environment.