Small businesses ramping up cybersecurity, thanks to AI

Rising AI adoption is helping cybersecurity providers hike their marketable base in India

- Pratishtha Bagai

Small businesses are ramping up adoption of managed cybersecurity services to take on an increasing volume of cyberthreats, with security providers using artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the cost of their services.

While scaling-down of costs is being done thanks to AI helping automate threat monitoring and alerts, the rising adoption is also helping cybersecurity providers increase their marketable base in the country, experts said.

Vishal Salvi, chief executive of domestic cybersecurity firm Quick Heal Technologies, told Mint that on an average, AI has the potential to reduce the manpower cost for a cybersecurity company by 30-40%. While the impact of this decrease in cost is not a 1:1 affair, in the long run, AI is undeniably accelerating the drop in per-unit cost of cybersecurity software as it grows at scale.

Businesses are already seeing the benefits of this. Karon Shaiva, managing director of Mumbai-based MSME Idobro Impact Solutions, said, "For small companies, the cybersecurity outlay is less than 1% of net expenditure, but this is also a factor of the cost of security services scaling down. This has happened thanks to AI helping scale costs."

This, Shaiva added, is because "it becomes very difficult for small enterprises to bear the financial, operational and reputational loss in the case of a cyberattack."