IS YOUR BUSINESS SAFE FROM DATA BREACHES?
The short answer is no.
It doesn’t matter if you are a blue-chip Fortune 100 company or a startup. At some point, an opportunistic hacker is going to target your business and your customers’ data. The results won’t be pretty.
Thankfully, there's a solution.
Breaches happen every day to companies of all sizes
You hear about them almost nightly on the news. But what is a data breach? The simplest definition is that a breach occurs when there is a gap or break in a barrier. When your business has a server or endpoint that isn’t updated with the necessary software “patches,” or rather, the latest protective updates to the program, it can become vulnerable very quickly.
A data breach can involve any type of information your company attempts to secure. One example would be your customers’ credit card information. Another would be their personal data or health information. Or your company’s trade secrets and IP. All these types of data have value to cyber criminals. This means that no business is safe from attempts by hackers to scan for holes in your system through which they can enter.
When a dreaded data breach does happen, what’s at stake? In the best case, your reputation. In the worst case, you lose millions of dollars on class action lawsuits. Even worse, in the direst of situations, lives could even be at risk. There’s almost no upper limit to the stakes where data breaches are concerned.
Business data breaches are increasing, with no end in sight
In the first half of last year, around 4.5 billion records were exposed due to breaches. In 2005, there were 157 reported breaches in the U.S. involving 66.9 million records. IBM reports that the average U.S. data breach costs $8.19 million USD and involves 25,575 records. By 2020, that cost is expected to exceed $150 million. Since 2013, 14.7 billion records have been $150 million lost or stolen.
If you have a small business, don’t think you can rest easy: The cost of just one record lost in a breach is on average $148. Even if you have a brand-new startup company with only ten customers so far, that’s a loss of $1,500 right out of the gate. Needless to say, this problem is very real. It’s also very expensive. Most breaches are engineered by razor-sharp hackers trained through efficient underground channels on exactly how to exploit common, innocent human errors.
The kind of errors one of your organization’s employees make every day. Like when your overworked IT staff of one fails to implement a critical software patch that leaves a big hole through which data thieves happily enter. What level of damage is your company’s infrastructure susceptible to simple errors like these? What risks are your customers exposed to?