Looking Back on 2021: The Year of Growth and Improved Cybersecurity 

The cybersecurity industry experienced major landscape shifts with new challenges in the past year. Ransomware attacks and phishing attempts doubled, cybersecurity insurance requirements grew stricter, and premiums increased. We saw more high-profile attacks than ever as the private and public sectors focused on preventing and remediating new threats.

Amid these rising threats, small and midsize organizations are seeing the need to improve their overall data security hygiene and posture with comprehensive, streamlined cybersecurity.

Meeting the Need for Cybersecurity

Over the last year, Defendify saw a dramatic increase in customers looking for comprehensive solutions that include 24/7 monitoring, detection, and response. In 2021, cyberattacks led to an average downtime of 23 days, which increased the potential for irreparable damage to affected companies’ operations and reputations, not to mention the financial implications. Unprotected organizations found themselves at a competitive disadvantage, as potential clients turned to partners who could ensure their company and customer data was kept secure. As organizations faced potential fines and legal action, the cost of breaches in 2021 amounted to an average of $3.6 million per incident. 2021 also saw the world record for the largest payout: $40 million paid by an insurance company.

Thankfully some organizations were prepared and even demonstrated significant improvement to their cybersecurity posture.

By reviewing user reports from Defendify’s comprehensive Cybersecurity Health Checkup, we found that most Defendify customers had significantly improved cybersecurity strength across their entire organization within the first three months of using the platform. The Cybersecurity Health Checkup tool is one of 13 modules within the Defendify platform that maps to industry security frameworks to assess the strength of current cybersecurity posture. After completing an assessment, organizations can see a score of their overall cybersecurity health, and where take actionable steps to improve data security and meet government, industry, and third-party security requirements.

With Defendify’s all-in-one approach to cybersecurity that expands protection across people, process, and technology, these organizations were better protected and better prepared for evolving cyber threats. Defendify is ideal for organizations without security teams as it allows them to have similar data protection often found at larger enterprise businesses, only without needing extra training, hardware, or an excessive budget.

Year of Momentum

In addition to increased customer growth, we recently welcomed longtime Oracle Chief Information Officer, Mark Sunday, to our advisory board, joining Rob Knake, Former White House Cybersecurity Director; Seth Bailey, Vice President of Information Security at Iron Mountain; Virginia Lee, Americas Privacy Officer at Cisco; and other cybersecurity industry leaders.

In 2021, Defendify also was honored to receive 30 accolades from industry groups, recognizing our platform for innovation, including Best Product in SMB Cybersecurity by Cyber Defense Magazine and New Product of the Year from Security Today Magazine for our new Breach Detection & Response product.

We’re honored to work alongside some really incredible customers and partners who had the following to say about their improved cybersecurity.

“Defendify has really been able to grow with us as a business. We started by using Defendify to get our cybersecurity house in order and to meet some compliance and vendor requirements from our enterprise customers. We’ve since expanded to include Defendify’s Breach Detection & Response, which now provides us with a 24/7 Security Operations Center with monitoring/containment/remediation. We were pleasantly surprised to have that up and running in just a couple of weeks. It’s been an eye-opener for us to see the Defendify reports. We feel so much better knowing we have a team of cybersecurity experts keeping a close eye on things around the clock.” – Internal Consultant in Semiconductors

“It was very important for us to work with a cybersecurity partner that took a defense in depth approach. There are literally thousands of cybersecurity products, many of which are excellent, but tend to solve very specific problems. Because our clients have such a wide range of infrastructure, capacities and threat models, we wanted a platform that could provide continuous assessment, awareness training, dark web and vulnerability scanning, policy creation, incident response planning and other elements that go into a mature cybersecurity program. Defendify is the only platform we found (or know of still) that provides all of this in one platform while still being affordable for the small businesses and nonprofits that make up our clientele.” – Vice President of Technology Strategy in Information Technology and Services

Defendify launched in 2017 to help small and midsized organizations streamline a comprehensive ongoing cybersecurity program. As we cap off a banner year, we’ve added thousands of new users around the globe who now trust Defendify to keep their data protected from evolving cyberattacks.