The ROI of CAD Security: Calculating the Cost of a Data Breach

The ROI of CAD Security: What a Data Breach Really Costs

Many engineering teams still treat CAD security as overhead. In reality, it is loss prevention.

The return on investment becomes much clearer when you look at the real cost of a breach. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. That figure includes downtime, recovery, legal exposure, and lost business. For CAD teams, however, the damage can run even deeper. A breach can expose intellectual property, corrupt assemblies, delay product releases, and weaken trust with customers and suppliers.

Real-world examples make that risk hard to ignore. After a 2019 cyberattack, Norsk Hydro reported losses of about NOK 650 million, or roughly $70 million USD at the time, from lost margin and recovery costs. In 2023, MGM Resorts said its cyberattack had an estimated negative EBITDA impact of about $100 million. These were not just IT issues. They quickly became major business problems.

Now consider what that kind of disruption would mean in a CAD environment. What would one day of lost access to your vault, drawings, revisions, or release workflows cost your business? How much time and money would it take to rebuild lost design work? And what would the impact be if a competitor, supplier, or threat actor gained access to sensitive product data?

That is why CAD security should not be viewed as a cost center. Instead, it should be seen as a safeguard for revenue, productivity, and competitive advantage. Investments in backup, access control, monitoring, patching, and recovery help reduce downtime, protect intellectual property, and keep engineering work moving.

Ultimately, the ROI of CAD security is not hard to justify. The real question is not whether security costs money. It is whether your business can afford the cost of going without it.

A free cybersecurity audit from Converge can help you identify hidden risks in your CAD environment before they turn into costly downtime, data loss, or IP exposure.

Sources: IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024; Norsk Hydro Annual Report (2019 cyberattack impact); MGM Resorts International 2023 SEC disclosures.