Despite the measures taken by small businesses against cyber-attacks, hackers are always getting inventive, discovering new loopholes to exploit. The impact is never funny for small businesses, leading many to close up involuntarily.
Unfortunately, the growing number of data breaches fails to correlate with an increase in businesses’ preparedness against cyberattacks, as most small businesses fail to implement even the most basic security measures to avoid an attack.
Here are some of the damaging ways data breaches affect small businesses.
The most hard-hitting impact that small businesses have to deal with in the event of a data breach is financial loss. A study by Ponemon Institute speculates the cost of data breach to average £3.2m globally.
Some of the costs could include compensation to affected customers, drafting out incident reports, investigation, and investing in new security measures. Legal fees are not excluded, not to mention the regulatory penalties imposed for non-compliance with the GDPR.
When there is a data breach, downtime is inevitable which will not only cost the business money but reputation as well. Operations will be halted, as investigations commence to uncover what or who caused the breach.
Depending on the severity of the data breach, investigation can take days, weeks, or even months, leading to loss of revenue for the small business,
Sensitive data can be lost when there is a data breach, and these could be sensitive data such as credit card details, customers’ names, addresses, email addresses, images, IP addresses, social security numbers, etc.
This could cause a serious uprising for small businesses, leading to a shutdown in extreme cases.
Reputational damages can lead to loss of customers, which, no doubt, is the intrinsic part of every small business. Without customers, small businesses cannot operate anymore, leading to an abrupt shutdown.
The loss of trust data breach causes will lead customers to look elsewhere for their goods and services.
The fact is you can avoid data breaches by taking some security measures such as working with password management tools, formidable antiviruses while updating your software for security patches.
You cannot always do it yourself, and that is why working with a team to buff up the security of your business is always recommended. For a small business, this is not always feasible due to the cost of managing a cyber security team.
Sometimes, working with a professional seems more feasible. Taking into consideration the consequences that come with a data breach, it is never a bad choice to invest in the security of your small business. Ready to start buffing up security? Feel free to give us a call or fill out the contact form to book an appointment.
