Kaspersky Lab Africa has compiled the latest report which measures the financial impact of IT security on businesses. And the report confirms that a single cyber security incident now costs large businesses around $861,000 on an average. The same study corroborates that Small and Medium Scale businesses (SMBs) are ending up paying an average of $86,500 per incident.
The compiled report of Kaspersky Lab also compares security budgets of firms with the losses incurred from serious cyber security incidents. Thus, the stats clearly show the disparity between businesses of different sizes, with annual security budget varying from just $1K for SMBs to over 1 million USD for large businesses.
“The average IT security budget is worth just 2.5 cyber attacks- when the losses incurred directly and indirectly are taken into account”, says Riaan Badenhorst, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab- Africa.
The study which was also carried out with the support of B2B International asked businesses to report their losses from the most serious security incidents in different categories. Most of them reported the costs by including the expenses incurred for additional staff wages, improvement of IT security, employment of external IT specialists and hiring new staff.
In next 3 years, firms who participated in the survey see a rise in their IT security budgets by 14% and that will solely be due to the increased complexity of IT infrastructure. On a present note, an SMB spends 18 percent on their total IT budget on security, whereas enterprises allocate 21% of their annual IT spend on tightening the measures related to cyber security.
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