How Do You Put a Price on Security and Compliance? Part II – Reducing Cost

This is the second in a four-part series of blogs on how we and our customers assess the business value of Protegrity solutions.

When asked to approve expenditures for data security and governance, executives with budget authority have decision criteria that extend beyond the specifications and features produced by the vendor – as we noted in the opening blog in this series.

These senior leaders – who generally do not share the same level of expertise as data and security architects and governance teams – look at the bigger picture, and measure success in business terms, such as support for strategic objectives; cost-benefit analysis; ROI, ALE, SLAs.

Based on the experiences of our customers, we have created three categories of spending justifications: reducing cost, increasing revenue, and minimizing risk. This blog will explore the first category: reducing cost.

A wholly different approach

Cost reductions start with the fact that Protegrity takes a wholly different approach to securing data and ensuring regulatory compliance. Legacy data security measures assume that the more barriers you erect, the safer the data will be. But this results in ever-spiraling costs without necessarily enhancing security.

Costs increase because more people spend more time on tasks such as validating credentials for users seeking access to data, conducting compliance audits, and chasing potential security breaches.

Protegrity takes a different approach: embedding data protection and centralized policy at the data level. Protegrity’s advanced controls – including masking, anonymization, and tokenization – travel natively with the data, wherever it goes and whoever accesses it.

This is a significant benefit in AI environments. Why? Because of the proliferation of users, vast amounts of unstructured data, and dynamic pipelines that severely test an organization’s ability to ensure the integrity, security, and compliance of all the data requested by authorized users. AI demands an entirely different approach to security and compliance – one that Protegrity uniquely provides.

With Protegrity, an organization can reduce or eliminate cost in several ways.

Avoiding security breaches

The greatest potential savings come from avoiding a data-security breach, the cost of which can be devastating. IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach” report for 2025 says the average cost of a data-security breach in the United States is $10.2 million. But that’s peanuts compared to the worst cases.

The most expensive data breaches have cost in the billions of dollars – yes, billions. That’s also true for failures of governance.

The costs from a data breach rapidly add up from numerous directions, including:

• incident investigation and forensics;
• customer notification;
• supplying credit-monitoring services for customers;
• legal expenses;
• class-action settlements;
• upgrades or replacement of IT systems;
• ransom (if paid);
• regulatory fines;
• increased cyber insurance premiums; and
• new headcount in security, IT, and governance teams.

Those are direct costs. There also are indirect costs, such as damage to the company’s reputation, which can make potential customers, employees, and partners hesitant to work with the company; loss of customers; and diversion of internal resources (e.g., legal, IT, PR) from normal activities to handling the aftermath of a breach.

With these costs running into the tens of millions, even billions, of dollars, the payback from preventing a breach is compelling. The annual cost of Protegrity solutions can amount to as little as one-hundredth, even one-thousandth, of the cost of a serious data breach. Let that sink in for a minute: as little as 0.001%.

And keep in mind this isn’t insurance, which pays after a breach; it’s prevention.

Streamlining audits and compliance

Another area of savings is a reduction in the cost of audits, compliance, and governance. These activities take time and people, so when Protegrity reduces the number of audits from several to one, there are significant savings.

Our discussions with customers indicate that for a large enterprise, annual labor costs for audits and other compliance activities may be around $4 million, with the centralized, one-time controls instituted with Protegrity cutting that figure by about 70 percent.

Simultaneously, licensing costs for software tools used in auditing and for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) can be reduced or eliminated, saving $100,000 or more per tool. So, savings in audits and compliance can easily reach or exceed $3 million annually.

In many cases, that number could be much higher. For example, a credit reporting agency has calculated it has saved $60 million in audit and compliance costs since becoming a Protegrity customer.

Enhanced productivity

Finally, there are potential savings from improvements in operations and employee productivity. For example, a health-care provider reported saving nearly $10 million after Protegrity’s solution allowed it to securely move data-processing offshore without replicating data-security measures.

Other improvements in productivity have been observed among application developers, data analysts and other knowledge workers who spend less time waiting for approvals to access data. On the surface, that may not sound like a big expense, but we know of many instances in which well-paid professionals have had to put a project on hold for hours, even days, awaiting approval to access or share protected data, or to learn how to satisfy certain regulations.

For people whose fully burdened cost may be upwards of $200/hour, delays of multiple days for scores of people can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars during a year.

The insights we have offered here complement the findings of an earlier Forrester study that calculated one customer’s total economic return from adopting Protegrity.

The next blog in this series will explore the theme of increasing revenue. In the meantime, learn how enterprises are benefitting from Protegrity solutions by reading some customer case studies.