Respondents were asked about the state of IT security within their organizations, the types of threats they face and the costs they have to deal with when recovering from attacks. The Kaspersky Global Corporate IT Security Risks Survey (ITSRS) interviewed a total of 5,266 IT business decision-makers across 31 countries in June 2020. This report explains why that is the case.

Quite often, different actions, or sometimes inaction, can make data breaches much more expensive than they otherwise could have been. The sections that follow will analyse new survey findings that reveal how businesses can minimize the costs of a data breach and the ways others can learn from this. This is just one of the many findings documented in this part of the IT Security Economics 2020 report. For example, being proactive and transparent, as well as quick to react, can help to reduce monetary losses. How enterprises and SMBs manage the aftermath of a breach goes a long way to determining the true, long-term cost. In addition, with the right approach and technologies in place, organizations can adopt plans to further minimize the potential cost of a cyberattack.

As of this year, on average, a breach costs an enterprise $1.09m and a small to medium-sized business (SMB) $101k, compared to $1.41m and $108k respectively in 2019. The good news for businesses is that, as documented in the first report in this series, the estimated financial impact of a data breach has started to decline. Unfortunately, due to the ever-changing threat landscape, more sophisticated hacking techniques and a growing desire amongst cybercriminals to harvest information for their own benefit, organizations need to be more aware of potential breaches than ever before.

Protecting corporate and personal data has become a necessity for modern businesses.

Breach 2020