Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

The High Cost of Cybersecurity Certifications: Worth It?

3 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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1:01

In this segment of a YouTube discussion, the speaker critiques the steep price—around $80,000—of third‑party cybersecurity assessments for manufacturers. While acknowledging that standards such as Aerospace AS9100 and ISO have long been part of the industry, the speaker argues that new security requirements add significant, often unjustified expenses. The core claim is that spending such sums on a cybersecurity certification does not improve shop‑floor efficiency or machine performance. Instead, the primary benefit may be indirect: the certification could unlock new contracts or allow the company to command higher fees and overhead rates. The speaker emphasizes the challenge manufacturers face in balancing these added costs against limited operational return on investment.

Chapters

So there's a whole group of people that are arguing, well, you should have been doing this all along. My argument is, yeah, but nobody was going to come around and charge $80,000 for a third-party assessment on something that had no ROI. So you could talk about Aerospace 9100, ISO, all these different certifications. We all— we could live and breathe those manufacturers, you know, those are old hat, we get it. different requirements now that are involved in security that didn't exist before, even on the peripheral. That's the challenge is figuring out now you have all these extra potential expenses that, oh, by the way, when you drop $80 grand for a third-party cybersecurity standard certificate, that's not going to improve your efficiency on the floor. Right. It might open the door to get you some contracts that you could hope you could integrate that into, to different fees and overhead rates and things like that. But that's not going to make your machines faster.