Does My Organization Need to Worry About Data Breaches?

Regardless of the size of your organization, you should be worried about and doing your best to prevent data breaches.

When data breaches make the news, it’s typically because it occured at a large multinational such as Yahoo, Google or Equifax. In fact, Yahoo has been the victim of many of the world’s biggest data breaches. This can give small businesses a false sense of security, in reality small businesses are as much of a target of data breaches as large corporations.

Even small businesses possess valuable data that can be the target of cyber criminals:

• Employee personally identifiable information (PII) like birthdates, social security numbers and full names
• Client names, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords
• Banking information including account and routing numbers
• Credit card numbers

While it’s true security breaches at large organizations net cybercriminals a higher payoff, small businesses tend to have fewer security protocols and no security team in place, making them easier targets.

The average cost of a data breach at small to midsize businesses is $86,500 in recovery expenses (1). For enterprises, this number rises to $861,000 (2). According to other reports, this number is more like $3.92 million.(4)