Security Breaches: The Kiss of Death for Small Business

For romantics, a kiss signifies love, affection, or respect. Unless you receive the kiss of death, which signifies that your days are numbered. For small business, a cyber-security breach is the dreaded kiss of death. Here are some stats that’ll start your heart from recent studies from Property Casualty 360 and Small Business Trends:

- 62% of cyber-attacks are focused on small to medium businesses - Only 14% of these businesses rating their ability to mitigate an attack as highly effective - Average cost of a breach for a small business, including damage or theft of assets and disruption of normal operations is slightly over $1.8M - 60% of small companies will go out of business within six months after an attack

While it may be surprising that 60% of SMBs attacked will be out of business, once you understand the typical cost of a successful attack, it’s far less surprising.

So do small business owners just give up in the face of these threats? Nah, that’s not the way entrepreneurs roll. Most small businesses can outsource the mitigation of this risk for less than $1K per month, offloading both the risk and the time that it takes to manage a security solution. For a small business, this can be the difference between life or death, much like an insurance policy.

In the world today, it’s no longer a matter of IF your company will be hit by a cyber-attack, it is a matter of WHEN. The question that you should ask yourself is, “Do I have almost 2 million dollars to handle it retroactively, or does it make more sense to spend $1,000 per month to proactively protect my livelihood and my customers?”

For a frank discussion on cyber-security and ways to mitigate these risk, reach out to Fluid. We can help.