The Affordability of Cybersecurity Costs in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of the affordability of cybersecurity costs in developing countries. The study applies review process guidelines that have been used in previous studies to extract relevant data used in the analysis. The articles reviewed in the study were drawn from search results on four digital libraries - IEEE Xplore, ACM, ScienceDirect, and ProQuest. The reviewed articles reveal an overlap in the affordability measures and the challenging factors which highlights the significance of these indices in developing robust cybersecurity capability and resilience. Low investment on cybersecurity education and limited IT resources are identified as key factors that impede cybersecurity affordability. While there are on-going efforts to address these issues, this study recommends the adoption of cybersecurity clinic by developing nations, as an effective approach in reducing the cost of cybersecurity and increasing skilled workforce to tackle the cyber threats ravaging the global digital space.