Guess what’s more expensive: protecting against cybersecurity attacks or fixing the damage done by them? You guessed it. It costs much less to take simple preventative measures, like training and technology, to prevent the hackers from getting in. The first step is to create your business cybersecurity budget.
Like we mentioned above, the answer to this question depends on whether your company is the victim of an attack or is doing proper planning. Most companies, unfortunately, wait until they’ve been attacked to put prevention and training in place. Here are the average cybersecurity costs:
Prevention: Typical cybersecurity prevention will carry an annual cost, on average, of about 20% of the technology budget.
Cost of a breach: According to Kaspersky Lab, the average cost of a breach is $38,000, which includes having to hire professional IT services, downtime, and potential lost business.
There are also hidden costs to a breach, including increased insurance premiums, a hit to the company credit rating, potential lawsuits, lost trust from customers, and more.
Companies who experience a data breach will have to pay the costs of that breach and then the cost of future prevention. As you can see, fixing the damage can run as high as 4x to 5x the cost of prevention. Given that about two-thirds of companies with fewer than 1,000 employees suffer an attack (with nearly 60% having been breached), it makes financial sense to spend now on prevention (source).
According to Gartner (a leading IT research organization), companies spend between 1% and 13% of their total IT budget on security. That will typically work out to $200-600 per month for an average small business, at a minimum.
There are three main components to cybersecurity budget planning:
Planning: Planning includes an analysis of your current cybersecurity situation, including vulnerabilities, training, and technology.
Implementation: Implementation includes upgrading technology and setting up server monitoring. Server monitoring can run at $450 per month to log and store data.
Training: Probably your greatest measure to prevent a cybersecurity attack is training. Training your workforce to identify an attack, shut it down, and take reactionary action in case of a breach will be your biggest weapon of defense.
Of course, a business could take its chances and spend $0 and wait for an incident. Incident response, from a consultation viewpoint alone, could easily add another $20,000 on top of those costs.
Planning your cybersecurity budget will depend on your specific business model, industry, and current cybersecurity posture. Small businesses can look to budget approximately $700-1000 per month. Larger businesses can estimate $1000 per employee per year.
In order to budget for your cybersecurity protection, begin with an assessment of your current situation. Use our free assessment tool, then give us a call to review any questions that come up from the results. The last thing you want to do is to leave cybersecurity out of your budget or allocate too little to help. Hackers are focusing on small businesses for that very reason.
Contact us now or learn more about our Cybersecurity Training.