Optimizing your cybersecurity with NDR:
what’s the return on investment (ROI)?

Cybersecurity is often seen as a cost center, when in reality it should be viewed as a driver for optimization and financial risk reduction. In the face of increasingly complex threats, companies need tools that can detect and respond to attacks rapidly — without overloading teams or exploding budgets.

That’s where NDR (Network Detection & Response) comes in: an advanced technology that analyzes network traffic in real time to identify malicious behavior and automate incident response.

But beyond the technical side — what’s the actual ROI of an NDR solution like Gatewatcher’s?

Before calculating the ROI of an NDR, it’s important to understand the real costs associated with cyberattacks:

• €4.88M: the average cost of a data breach in France [1]
• 207 days: average time to detect a breach without advanced tools — plus 70 additional days to contain it [2]
• 60% of SMBs that suffer a cyberattack go out of business within 6 months [3]

The financial consequences go far beyond technical remediation — they include loss of productivity, GDPR fines, damage to reputation, and lost contracts.

An NDR  helps mitigate these risks by delivering three key benefits:

        1. Reducing detection and response times (MTTD / MTTR)

Before NDR:

• An incident is often detected weeks or even months later
• Manual investigations are time-consuming and expensive
• Mean response time spans several days or weeks

With NDR :

• Real-time detection based on behavioral analysis and AI
• Automatic correlation with other security tools (SIEM, SOAR, EDR, XDR)
• 50–90% reduction in response time ¹.

Estimated gain: up to €500,000 per year² saved in incident response costs for large enterprises.

       2. Optimizing human resources and reducing SOC workload

One of the main challenges for SOC teams is alert overload and incident prioritization. An NDR helps by:

Filtering and prioritizing alerts, reducing SOC noise by 60–80% [4].
Automating investigation to minimize time spent on false positives.

Preventing analyst burnout and lowering turnover

Estimated gain: €100,000 to €200,000 per year [5] through optimized staffing and reduced turnover in organizations with an internal SOC.

     3. Preventing the costs of data breaches

An NDR can stop an attack before it causes serious damage. That means:

• Lower remediation and recovery costs
• Fewer direct financial losses (e.g. fraud, ransomware)
• Reduced impact on brand reputation and customer trust

Estimated gain: Data breaches cost an average of $4.88 million, according to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report [6], up 9% from the previous year.
With an NDR platform in place, you can potentially prevent millions of euros in losses in the event of a breach.

¹ ​Estimate based on feedback from companies with fewer than 500 employees that have implemented an NDR platform, according to their experience with SOC optimization.

² Estimate based on feedback from companies with fewer than 500 employees that have implemented an NDR platform, according to their experience with reducing incident response costs.

Cybersecurity should no longer be viewed as just an expense, but as a profitable investment. A solution like Gatewatcher’s NDR helps optimize threat detection, reduce operational costs, and boost SOC efficiency.

In a time of tighter budgets, the question is no longer if you should invest in an NDR — but rather, how much will you lose without one?

Sources :

[1], [6] IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024

[2] IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022

[3] WeDemain

[4] Common and Best Practices for Security Operations Centers: Results of the 2019 SOC Survey

[5] Data.gouv.fr