Prevention costs a small business between $15,000 and $45,000 a year. A single ransomware incident averages $250,000 in recovery costs, and can climb to seven figures when you add in downtime, legal fees, and lost business.
That’s not a close call.
Yet 47% of businesses with fewer than 50 employees spend nothing on cybersecurity. Not a reduced amount. Zero. The operating assumption seems to be that an attack won’t happen, or that if it does, it’ll be manageable.
Neither of those things is true.
Ransomware today doesn’t just encrypt your files. Attackers steal the data first, then threaten to release it publicly even if you restore from backup. That’s called double extortion, and it means your backup strategy alone isn’t enough anymore. You need to prevent attackers from getting in. Because if they get in, the backup conversation is already the wrong one to be having.
The average ransomware attack causes 24 days of downtime. For most small businesses, nearly a month without full operations isn’t a disruption. It’s a potential closure. VikingCloud research found that 40% of SMBs said a $100,000 attack would end their business.
And then there’s the detection gap. The Ponemon Institute found that the average time to identify a breach is 194 days. That means an attacker can be inside your network for six months before anyone notices. During that window they’re reading your emails, mapping your systems, harvesting credentials, and staging their next move. Active monitoring compresses that window dramatically, from months to hours.
IBM data shows that having a tested incident response plan in place reduces breach costs by an average of $232,000. Not from running a sophisticated security operation, just from having a plan and testing it.
The businesses that spend the least on security end up paying the most when something goes wrong.
If you don’t know what your current exposure looks like, that’s the right place to start. Our Cyber Liability Scan identifies the gaps attackers would find first, in plain language, without the technical noise. Contact us to take the next step: https://www.rstechnology.net/contact-us/
