Data breaches can be detrimental and costly to your business. We constantly hear about data breaches in the news, with massive companies like Facebook, Target, Sony, and Home Depot being affected, but did you know that a study has revealed that nearly 71% of data breaches occur to companies with 100 or fewer employees?
You may have installed a firewall on your network and updated security patches for your operating system, but that alone is not enough to protect your organization from cyberattacks. Cyberattackers are increasingly using more sophisticated ways to target and attack organizations. Cybersecurity breaches are becoming more difficult to trace and costlier to deal with.
An annual survey conducted by IBM revealed that the financial consequences of a data breach on organizations have risen 12% over the past five years. While massive organizations often recover from data breaches, small businesses are left hanging by a thread as they don’t have the resources, time, and money to recover from a data breach. This often results in small companies filing for bankruptcy or shutting their doors.
The average cost of a data breach now is $3.92 million, which depicts how data breaches can have severe financial repercussions, with a complex process of resolving cyberattacks and increased regulation.
A data breach can put an organization in a tough spot, making them invest thousands of dollars, if not millions, to conduct a forensic investigation, pay fines and penalties to compliance authorities, compensate customers or employees whose data was compromised during the breach, and recovering from the loss of market reputation.
The bigger the data breach, the bigger the loss.
Data breaches are an unfortunate reality for businesses around the world today and their consequences are often severe and damaging. While financial recovery costs can be measured, the loss in market reputation and customer loyalty cannot be quantified.
Here is a list of the most severe long-term effects of a data breach on businesses:
