How Much Should Small Businesses Spend on Cyber Security?
Small businesses and entrepreneurs understand the need for accurate budget planning. To optimise revenues, it’s important that small businesses conduct meticulous budgeting and forecasting on all expenditures—cyber security costs to the business being no exception.
Managing a budget to the nines is a must when operating a small business. It covers anything from monitoring the business cash flow, reducing unnecessary expenses and distributing revenues evenly.
Running a small business is no small task. There’s so much to consider all at once. Unfortunately, in today’s business climate, business owners must consider the potential of cyber threats and weigh up the cyber security costs to their business accordingly.
As cybercrime has risen massively in these past few years, many small business owners have become more aware of the importance of adequate cyber security, but there is still some confusion as to how much is too much to invest in cyber security.
This is where Perth’s cyber security experts step in. In this article, we’ll help you understand what cyber security costs to your small business should look like and what the approximate cyber security services pricing is.
What Does a Standard Cyber Security Expenditure Look Like?
You’re probably wondering what a normal, or standard small business expenditure looks like. Well, there isn’t such a thing as a normal cyber security price for small businesses since there isn’t a standard modelled small business. However, there are some things to consider when you’re calculating how much the standard cyber security cost to your small business should be.
As for the aspects to pay attention to when making a budget-friendly cyber security investment for a small business, they are as follows:
- Calculate the average amount spent on cyber security;
- Consider technology expenses for businesses of your sort;
- Understand the importance of your database—a financial business has a particularly susceptible database to cyberattacks as the customer data you have is of high value;
- Make inquiries from your stakeholders and customers.
General Cyber Security Cost for Small Businesses
Many shield experts state that the cyber security price should account for roughly 10% of the said business’s expenditure, whereas most businesses spend closer to 20%. Small financial businesses and companies highly involved with technology and databases have much larger expenditures to keep those enormous databases safe.
A designated analysis by Forbes states that expenditures on data protection are expected to expand by 33%, or roughly around $585 million, while the security of the business database is expected to climb by 7.2%. Big firms are doing everything they can to protect themselves against cybercrime. Intriguingly, smaller businesses are doing almost the same thing—now seeing the importance of a pragmatic and proactive approach to cyber security.
In terms of figures, if your small business employs 100 people and has a monthly technical budget of $5,000, you ought to set aside about $500 for cyber security costs. You may expand it too since some IT services offer flexible cyber security services pricing. What’s more, you can even ask your supplier for a risk evaluation, to prevent potential data leakage.
Consider that the 10% of your monthly IT revenue spent on cyber security costs will amount to approximately 0.5% of your total income. In the simplest of terms, this is a minor expense for gaining high-quality cyber security for your small business.
Return of Investment Method: The Small Business Hero
Another method to consider when analysing the cost of cyber security for your business is in terms of a policy called Return on Investment (ROI). It would be an enormous success if you spend $10,000 on a cyber security price every year to avoid losing, let’s say, $50,000 in sales.
It’s worth mentioning that maintaining a bigger budget is less necessary than hiring a reliable IT company. You may spend the vast majority of your technological expenditure and never receive the exact degree of protection as you would with 5% expenditure. This is because you must carefully select your collaborators and examine the cyber security groups that provide these services.
As a cherry on top, it is advised you do thorough research and compare different providers before making an informed decision.
Another study shows us that financial businesses tend to spend anywhere from 6% up to 14% of their IT expenditure on cyber security costs. On average, the cyber security services pricing ranges between $100 to $500 for small businesses with a smaller database.
One issue concerning cyber security danger is moving a tad faster than usual. The moment any data is received, a new risk scenario that you lack sufficient data for emerges. As a result, there is no way to develop models to anticipate annual losses.
To mend the issue, make a list of digital records and assets and estimate the value they earn your small business. Next, evaluate the requirements that your organisation needs to comply with to meet the industry standards concerning your small business.
Keep your total IT spending on your mind at all times. Should the overall IT expenditure amount come to 20% or lower, consider that you have a good starting point to evaluate future cyber security prices.
Strategies for Establishing Cyber Security Expenditure
When designing any form of expenditure pay special attention to separate statistics and analysis. This way, you’ll have a better understanding of your common IT challenges, and you’ll be able to address and expand these by implementing any useful strategies down the line.
Regarding the questions you need to be asking before hiring cyber security IT specialists, they are as follows:
- How many times did your web page collapse?
- What was the reason behind it?
- How many DoS or DDoS attacks were made against your system?
- Has your computer database recently been infected by malware or other viruses?
- Are you facing continuous database threats? If so, how often?
- Has your database been hacked only once or numerous times?
- Is there anyone in your workplace who has fallen prey to phishing attacks?
Collecting all of this data will undoubtedly assist you in properly forecasting your threshold for future cyber security expenditure—whilst also ensuring your small business efficiently avoids exposure to cyber risks and threats.
Cyber Security to Small Businesses’ Rescue: The Verdict
All in all, if you haven’t got a clue on how to calculate your IT expenditures, or you don’t have any IT specialists at hand, there are numerous security expenditure calculators out there.
But, if you’re running a small business in Australia, then cyber security Perth, is your best bet. If you care to get your database secure, pronto, our experts at GPK group will deliver high-quality and offer low cyber security costs to keep you safe and sound from cyber attacks.
