The average data breach cost for businesses with under 500 employees is $2.98 million.
Can Your Organization Afford This?
A data breach can cost SMB's more than just money. While the financial hit is potentially unrecoverable, an organization may also face large scale reputational damage, legal trouble, and productivity. SMB's are particularly vulnerable due to often lacking some of the technologies and protocols necessary to fend off cyber attacks. This means that small businesses need to work twice as hard to ensure the privacy of their clients and employees data.
Here are some additional data breach loss statistics to put the issue into perspective:
- 60% of breaches businesses had to raise their prices to account for the losses incurred in a breach. This puts the burden on the client, which in turn could cost your business reputational damage. Business News Daily
- In 2022 it took an average of 9 months to detect and contain a breach. This means that cyber criminals have had months to infiltrate and wreak havoc on your business without you even knowing. IBM Cost of a data breach 2022
- 560,000 new pieces of malware are detected every day. This means that there are hundreds of thousands of ways a cyber criminal can breach your organization. Forbes
- In March of 2023, 41.9 million records were compromised by cyberattacks globally. Cyber Magazine
- The most common initial attack vector in a data breach is stolen credentials. This underscores the importance of strong passwords! Spy Cloud
What Can You Do?
What can your business do to curb the losses of a potential data breach? For starters you need to plan for when disaster strikes. It's not a matter of if you'll be attack, but when. Implementing crucial security controls such as firewalls, ZTA, vulnerability scanning, and email filtering can help reduce your overall attack surface.
Additionally, security awareness training can educate your employees on the dangers of social engineering and how to spot a phishing scam when it hits their inbox. An MSP like CorpInfoTech can your organization improve your overall security posture by offerings your SMB the enterprise level tools to tackle the most advanced threats.
CorpInfoTech (Corporate Information Technologies) provides small to mid-market organizations with expert I.T. services including compliance assessment, cybersecurity penetration tests, and comprehensive business continuity planning services. CorpInfoTech can help organizations, quantify, create, refine, and mitigate the risks presented by business threatening disasters in whatever form they may be disguised.
