Especially in the past 10 years, I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity to help clients navigate a security breach. The adage we’d say then, “it’s not a matter of if, but when,” sadly still holds up today. In fact, the sophistication of the attacks continues to accelerate, and surely AI is partly to blame for that acceleration.

When it comes to protecting your business, the speed of the response matters. If a breach is caught quickly, ground zero may have been contained. The issue likely won’t bubble up into a major business disrupting event. If the breach is not contained, it can become a major business impacting situation, one that sadly some organizations never fully recover from.

As Spark has launched this year, I quickly recognized that helping our clients improve their protections and posture against the cyber attack landscape was going to be a huge priority. If we helped a client with a Revenue Sprint, or with savings and negotiations on an upcoming purchase, all for them to suffer from a security incident, all of that great work would be null and void.

The clock is a lot faster than it used to be

If you want a sense of how much the ground has shifted, look at breakout time. That is the window between an attacker’s first foothold on one machine and the moment they start moving laterally through your environment. It is, in practical terms, the window you have to catch something at ground zero.

CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report put the average eCrime breakout time at 29 minutes. That is 65% faster than the year before. The fastest one they observed was 27 seconds. In one case, data was out the door four minutes after initial access.

Now hold that up against how most organizations actually respond. Someone notices something odd Thursday afternoon. They mention it Friday. IT gets a look Monday morning. That is not negligence, that is just how a busy company with no dedicated security staff operates. But the gap between 29 minutes and three days is the entire ballgame.

Speed is not a product you buy, it’s a decision you make in advance

Response time is decided long before the incident. It comes down to two things: whether you have people who already know what to do, and whether you have a stack that sees and acts without waiting for a human to log in.

On the people side, we’ve built a curated network of CISOs and CTOs. These are not names in a directory. They are practitioners I know, who have sat in the chair, and who can be pulled in for a posture review, a tabletop exercise, or a live incident. When something happens, our clients are not opening a browser and searching for an incident response firm at 11pm.

On the technology side, we’ve built a strategic partnership with CrowdStrike, and we lead with it for a specific reason. A single lightweight agent, managed detection and response with humans watching around the clock, and threat intelligence informed by what is happening across their entire customer base. It is a complete stack a business can invest in, rather than four point products that don’t talk to each other.

The part that surprises people

Most owners assume that tier of protection is reserved for the Fortune 500. It isn’t, and the pricing is where the old way of buying really shows its age.

The conversation usually starts the same way. A small team, a dozen or two dozen employees, somebody clicks something they shouldn’t have. Nothing catastrophic comes of it that time. But it is the wake up call, and the good ones treat it like one. The first question is almost always the same: “we’re too small for something like CrowdStrike, aren’t we?”

You’re not. CrowdStrike publishes its list pricing openly, which I appreciate. Falcon Go runs $59.99 per license per year and Falcon Enterprise runs $184.99 per license per year. Those are the numbers a small business finds on its own, multiplies out, and quietly decides it can’t afford.

What that business usually doesn’t know is that CrowdStrike runs pre-approved bundle programs built specifically for small and midsize organizations, and they don’t price anything like list. Working through those programs, we routinely put entry level coverage in front of a small team for around $17.10 per license per year, 71% off the $59.99 MSRP, and the deeper Enterprise tier, complete with a team watching around the clock, for around $89.63 per license per year, 51% off the $184.99 MSRP. On a twenty person company, the annual number often lands somewhere between a decent laptop and a conference booth.

That is a rounding error next to the cost of a single day of downtime, let alone a client data disclosure. And it is exactly what the modern way of buying is supposed to look like. Not a markup on a quote. A partner who knows which bundle programs exist, benchmarks the number before you sign, and puts real options in front of you in days instead of weeks.

Take stock of your own response time

So here is what I’d encourage you to do this week, and it costs nothing. Ask your team one question: if we found out right now that a machine in this building was compromised, what happens in the next 30 minutes? Not the next three days. The next 30 minutes. Who gets the alert? Who has the authority to isolate the machine? Who do we call if it is bigger than we can handle?

If the answers come back slowly, or with a lot of “I think,” that is your real exposure. It isn’t a product gap, it’s a readiness gap, and it’s fixable well before you need it.

We’re glad to walk through it with you, benchmark what you’re paying today, and put a real number and a real plan in front of you. Drop us a note through our contact form, and we’ll get right back to you.

Much thanks,

Tim Hazell
Founder & CEO, Spark Ventures Group