7 Cost-Effective Tips To Implement Cyber Security

Are you looking for straightforward, actionable, and cost-effective advice on how you can secure your business against cyber threats? If so, you've come to the right place!

In this blog post, we break down the seven most important cybersecurity domains and outline clear, actionable guidance on what tools, techniques, or processes can be adopted to secure your business. The key theme of this blog is to maximize your return on investment.

1. Email & Collaboration Security

If your business is even remotely modern, you'll need to collaborate with customers, partners, and colleagues over a mixture of communication channels with the ability to share documents easily and securely.

To do this, we recommend using either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, which are both leaders when it comes to business collaboration. Who you choose is a matter of preference as both products have public pricing, can be purchased self-service, and offer comparable features. However, there are some notable advantages to each option.

Regardless of which provider you choose, expect to pay USD$20 per employee per month for collaboration software, which includes a variety of bundled collaboration and security tools.

Now, with email security, there's a lot of misinformation on what's actually required to secure your employees' email inboxes. Both Google and Microsoft have come a long way over the past few years with their out-of-the-box spam and phishing prevention capabilities. While you can choose to purchase a third-party secure email gateway, it is most definitely not required.

CanIPhish Recommendation: We recommend Microsoft 365 for a few reasons, but the biggest simply comes down to how far-reaching and well-integrated Microsoft's ecosystem is. Instead of choosing multiple providers for multiple different cybersecurity domains, it's easier and more cost-effective to go with one provider that offers a unified licensing model.

2. Human Security

The aim of human security is to turn untrained, vulnerable employees into employees who are able to proactively identify cyber-attacks. To do this, you typically want to monitor and manage at least three distinct human risk factors:

Fortunately, there are dozens of vendors that specialize in human risk management, most of which provide off-the-shelf, cloud-accessible software that is ready to go. However, in line with the theme of this blog, you want to choose a vendor that's going to maximize your return on investment. Aim to spend less than USD$1 per employee per month on human security.

CanIPhish Recommendation: To help provide a starting point, the team at CanIPhish has curated a list of the top 10 security awareness training vendors of 2025.

3. Endpoint Security

Any of your employees may unknowingly download and execute software on their device that is designed to compromise it. Once compromised, the device can then be used for a range of follow-on actions, but most commonly for businesses, it's to try and steal money either directly through a fund transfer or indirectly through blackmail, ransomware, etc. The aim of endpoint security is to identify malicious software and stop it in its tracks before it can cause any harm.

Over the past 5 years, Microsoft has invested tremendous resources into building Microsoft Defender into one of the most effective endpoint security solutions in the market.

While other vendors may boast that their endpoint security software can protect you against ransomware or the boogeyman, it's mostly just marketing hype designed to extract money from businesses with little to no additional benefit to the average buyer. In line with this, aim to spend nothing on endpoint security software!

CanIPhish Recommendation: Use Microsoft Defender. It's free, it's compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac, it's easy to manage, and, importantly, it's effective!

4. Application Security

Does your business provide a software product or cloud-delivered platform to customers? If so, this hopefully isn't the first time you've heard of application security, but if it is, we have some solid advice on how you can secure your software product!

We'll break our recommendation into three phases: Code Security, Build Security, Runtime Security (in aggregate this is often referred to as Cloud-Native Application Protection)

4.1. Code Security

The aim of code security is to provide your developers with security tips (i.e., IntelliSense), as they're literally writing code in their preferred IDE. A range of both free and paid tools are available to do this. Unless you're a major enterprise with distributed software development teams, aim to spend nothing on code security software. It's going to provide immediate value with no configuration overhead and no direct financial cost.

CanIPhish Recommendation: Use SonarQube, a free and open-source code security scanning tool.

4.2. Build Security

The aim of build security is to provide your security team with insight into whether your developers are actually following their code security tips! A range of both free and paid tools are available for this. As with code security, unless you're a major enterprise with distributed software development teams, aim to spend nothing on build security software.

CanIPhish Recommendation: Integrate your code security scanning software with your build pipeline tool.

4.3. Runtime Security

The aim of runtime security is to ensure the infrastructure that your software or cloud platform runs on is secure against runtime-related threats such as malware. Depending on who you use to host your software, the runtime security tools that are available will differ. However, we find that it's best to stick to the security tools that are natively provided by your cloud hosting provider.

In almost all cases, your cloud hosting provider knows their technology stack and customers better than any other vendor, and by using their natively provided tooling, you'll, in almost all cases, find it meets your needs while also being the most cost-effective and easiest to manage approach.

CanIPhish Recommendation: At CanIPhish, we use Amazon Web Services (AWS), and accordingly, we use a variety of AWS native security tools such as AWS GuardDuty, AWS Inspector, AWS Config, and AWS CloudWatch.

5. Governance Risk & Compliance

One of the biggest misconceptions is that Governance Risk & Compliance (GRC) hinders business growth. Instead, you need to reverse this mindset and view it as a tool to provide customers with assurance that your product or business is safe and secure, making it a business and sales enabler.

If your business is selling a software product or platform, you'll want to pursue a SOC 2 Type 2 Attestation Report. For other types of businesses, an ISO 27001 Report will be more suited.

One of the most cost-effective ways to obtain a third-party compliance report is by using compliance automation software such as Vanta or Drata. Both these providers specialize in providing software that makes the entire compliance attainment process much easier through automated tooling for the generation of policies, automated monitoring of infrastructure, and relationships with audit companies that you can leverage to actually conduct audits. Expect to pay between USD$15k-30k to obtain a SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO 27001 Report.

CanIPhish Recommendation: In CanIPhish's experience, Vanta has delivered greater value at a lower cost and with less pushy salespeople.

6. Identity & Access Management

If your business has more than a handful of employees, Identity & Access Management (IAM) software that provides Single Sign-On (SSO) is a must-have. It not only helps employees to centrally manage their identities and reduce password reuse, but it also helps administrators to centrally manage application permissions and enforce uniform authentication standards such as multi-factor authentication across all applications, making the organization as a whole much more secure.

There are dozens of tools that can be used for SSO, some of which have some really neat bells and whistles, but in line with the theme of this blog, we're all about maximizing return on investment. Both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace provide built-in SSO capabilities that are enterprise-capable and, best of all, free for existing customers! So, for identity & access management, aim to spend nothing on IAM software!

CanIPhish Recommendation: Use of Microsoft Entra ID. It has a very robust SSO capability and comes bundled at no additional cost with Microsoft 365, but if you're using Google Workspace for collaboration, just stick with your native provider.

7. Device Security

The aim of device security is to ensure all corporate devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, have uniform cybersecurity controls, with the ability to remotely manage and wipe any sensitive data at a moment's notice. There are countless reasons why this may need to be done, and having good device management software is a must-have.

Ideally, your collaboration software provider will provide bundled device security software, meaning you can expect to pay nothing for device security!

CanIPhish Recommendation: Use Microsoft Intune. If you have a Microsoft 365 "Business Premium" plan or similar, Microsoft Intune is bundled at no additional cost and is an industry leader in device management, making it an easy choice!

Conclusion

When deciding whether or not to follow one of the tips or recommendations outlined in this blog, make sure to ask yourself what the goal of cybersecurity is within your organization and, at an absolute minimum, what is required to meet that goal.

Once you have a clear picture of what success looks like, you'll be well-equipped to differentiate between must-have and nice-to-have functionality, allowing you to implement tools, techniques, or processes that have the highest return on investment.