The cost of a data breach can be very expensive for small businesses as well as for the big corporations such as Facebook ( Meta ). Data breaches are very costly for any business no matter what the size is. You might have an estimate of how much a data breach can cost a business but in reality it is a lot higher than expected.
How Much Does A Data Breach Cost?
As a business owner it is important to understand that a data breach can lead to significant loss in terms of the financial side, but also in terms of the businesses reputation. During a recent survey small business owners expect the cost of a data breach to be an estimate loss of less than £1000 and are expected to recover with in 3 months.
The reality of this is much scarier when looking into recent cyber security breaches for a small business it was a huge £2.98 million. This is the total cost including business cost such as incident response, system repair, customer notification, legal fees and then the potential of fines for not following compliance. Not only is it very expensive in reality but the time to recover is a lot higher than expected, in recent studies we have found that it can take close to 9 months to fully recover from a security breach.
Unfortunately, the cost doesn't just stop there as there is often a loss of revenue that follows a cyber security breach as the customer will have lost trust with your company and often find other solutions from more trustworthy businesses.
Why Are The Costs Of Data Breaches So High?
Now you probably think the close the 3 million is rather high for someone just getting hacked. Studies from nationwide which is a large insurance company has suggested that the average cost of a security attack was around £15-20000, but that is not the whole story.
Those figures are for cyber attacks only which may or may not have cause significant data breach and they don't include things like server crashes. They are also based on cyber insurance claims which often don't cover the indirect expenses of a data breach such as loss of customers or even downtime whilst your business recovers.
Furthermore, the nature of the data can also drive up costs of a data breach as well any intellectual property as these are often targets for data breaches. Plus the suggested cost from nationwide does not factor in any penalties you or your business might face when they have had a data breach.
What Are The Non-Financial Costs Of A Data Breach?
The non-financial side that follows a cyber security breach can be just as devastating as well as the monetary value. This mainly focuses on the loss of customers and the loss of a customers trust. As a business you might also lose the competitive advantage over the market.
In addition to this small businesses are not prepared as much as larger companies for a security breach as they do not have a spare large amount of money to throw at the costs, so they might lose everything not just customers but the entire business might go under.
Cyber security breaches are not just an expensive inconvenience but they are business threatening and potentially business ruining so it is best to stay prepared no mater what size your business is.
The best way to prevent a breach is to invest in some good cyber security we do offer this as a service here: https://directcomputers.co.uk/pages/cyber-security-services
This will cover all of your needs as a business as the best front line defence to cyber security attacks. Some of the other ways that you can prevent a cyber security breach is to back up your data regularly so you can recover it quickly in the event of a an emergency. You can also enable 2 factor authentication as well to any logins and take a zero trust security model into affect. This just means that you treat every login as a threat but it is better to be over-cautious rather than having to spend £3 million on recovery.
What We Offer-
In today's digital age, cybersecurity is a primary concern of everybody that isn't currently living under a rock. Gain exclusive access to our extensive expertise of cybersecurity practitioners and IT support services in Sheffield and the surrounding area. We've worked with our large clientele for years, and our experience in protecting sensitive information, be it financial data, intellectual property, or personal data, is top-notch. Here is a few things that we can offer you and your business:
- Managed Network Security
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