Cybercrime has reached an all-time peak thanks to the new evolutions of AI, and businesses and even technology itself is struggling to catch up. While the fight against cybercrime is an ongoing battle, there are a few essential methods that you can implement today for the sake of your business that can help protect you, your data, and even your money from criminals.
Cybercrime’s Growth, Explained
Cybercrime is massive, and for good reason—it’s highly profitable. Estimates currently place the cost of cybercrime at $10.5 trillion in 2025 alone. To put that into perspective, cybercrime is the third largest economy in the world. Cybercrime is easily one of the greatest risks facing humanity today, outpacing even climate-related natural disasters in terms of cost and scope.
It’s also growing. Experts predict that cybercrime will increase 2.5% every year through to 2031. The estimated cost of cybercrime by then? $12.2 trillion. To put this into perspective, the average worldwide cost of cybercrime in 2020 for the whole year was $1 trillion.
This figure makes up lost revenue from multiple sources, including:
- Data loss
- Productivity loss
- Intellectual property theft
- Personal or financial data theft
- Embezzlement
- Fraud
- Post-attack disruption
- Ransom
You only need to dip your toe into the current SaaS security threats to uncover just why cybercrime is growing so readily. Not only are common user-based issues becoming exploited thanks to around-the-clock AI-powered attacks, but new approaches are also directly targeting businesses with greater accuracy. Therefore, it’s critically important to ramp up your business’ cloud security ASAP.
How to Protect Against Cybercrime
To protect against cybercrime, you need a rounded, full-body approach that works to reduce human error, segment systems to act as a stopgap if a breach occurs, and adopt around-the-clock defense systems. With that in mind, the best practice cloud security practices for 2026 and beyond include:
Following the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (v2 MCSB)
The new v2 of Microsoft’s MCSB best practice guidelines details how to monitor compliance, enforce baselines, and assess AI workflows to improve platform, application, and monitoring security.
Increase Login Credentials and Access Rules
Ensure all users are operating with strong and unique login credentials that aren’t replicated anywhere else. You’ll also want to deploy multi-factor authentication and a zero-trust firewall (either a next-gen firewall NGFW or a web application firewall) to identify and block advanced AI-powered threats.
Improve Encryption
Encryption itself needs an update to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), to use symmetric encryption, or quantum key distribution to encrypt data against the emerging risk that is quantum computing. PQC uses advanced algorithms designed to protect data from both classic and quantum computers. Why do you need to protect against a system that doesn’t exactly exist yet? Because criminals are stealing even encrypted datasets with the expectation they’ll be able to decrypt them later down the line.
Use AI Analytics to Supercharge Your Protections
Finally, AI can be used to analyze and understand workflows and user access patterns to immediately detect and lock down anomalous actions. Security specialists are also expected to adopt agentic agents of their own, deploying a digital team to address alerts and threats by handling high-level analyses, data correlation, incident summaries, and threat intelligence drafting.
