The Cost of Skimping on IT Security: You’re Looking at a $1,000,000+ Hit to Recover from a Security Breach
You’ve heard about the Target, Home Depot, and Sony breaches… and if you only hear about cyberattacks through the news, it’s easy to think that only the biggest of businesses are really at risk of being attacked online.
But that’s not true, not at all. First of all, the total number of threats that are out there is obscene, with over 300 million new pieces of malware created in 2014 alone. And most of those threats aren’t directed towards enterprises, as the majority of attacks last year, 60% to be exact, targeted SMBs.
If you’re hit, good luck staying in business. It’ll cost you an average of $150 per compromised file to recover from a security breach, and thousands of files are compromised in your average attack, so you’re looking at what could be a six or even seven-figure hit to recover form just a single attack. That’s enough to force 55% of SMBs to close down within just 6 months of an online security breach.
What Neglecting Proper Security Will Cost You
SMBs often don’t have the biggest budget to work with, and one of the first places to get cut (or never get invested in in the first place) is proactive IT support. If everything’s working well enough now, what are you paying for, anyway?
But penny-pinching is a terrible approach to take with your IT infrastructure. Any of the short-term savings you see by going with a reactive rather than proactive solution are sure to be obliterated by the disaster that will follow such neglect.
For example, investing in proactive network security now won’t cost you near as much as that $1,000,000+ hit you’re setting yourself up for later if you don’t have a proactive solution in place.
OffSite IT will keep track of all your software’s updates and patches to make sure your protected from known threats, and we will regularly assess your network to find and fix any vulnerabilities before they’re taken advantage of by cybercriminals.
Want to learn more about what you could do to protect your data? Give us a call at (866) 828- or send a message over to 6674info@offsiteIT.com .
More than Just Security: The Big Picture
Even if your outdated IT infrastructure somehow avoids being hit with a security breach, it’ll still end up costing you.
Let’s look at the big picture, here.
Your IT budget is likely a pretty small piece of your overall budget. What actually is taking up the most room in your budget are the wages and benefits you’ve invested in your employees.
Make the most of that investment. The cloud will mobilize your employees, freeing them from the office and allowing them to access business data, share files, and collaborate on projects from home or a coffee shop or wherever else they can find an internet connection. OffSite IT will also maintain your hardware and keep it from failing, which means you’ll see far fewer instances of productivity-killing downtime.
By providing your workers with the best tools available (and actively maintaining those tools), you’ll get more bang for your buck from all of the many dollars you’ve dedicated to your payroll.
Contact us at (866) 828- or 6674info@offsiteIT.com for more information about our IT services.