High-profile data breaches have become an uncomfortably common part of life in recent years.
Our news is now regularly punctuated by stories about massive retailers, insurance providers, banks and technology companies being hacked. In 2018 alone, there were over 6,500 breach incidents reported that compromised over 5 billion sensitive records — a 500% increase from just 5 years ago.1 For obvious reasons, incidents featuring an iconic Fortune 500 company and the loss of millions of sensitive customer records generate a lot of press. And while the attention heaped on these mega-breaches does raise overall awareness about the importance of data security, it also reinforces the long-standing fallacy that the threat is primarily isolated to large enterprises.
In reality, nearly half the beach victims are small businesses.2 The average direct cost for a single security breach is estimated to be nearly $120,000 for businesses with less than 500 employees.3 This figure doesn’t even account for indirect costs of breach recovery.