The cost of a cybersecurity program in business depends on the size and type of business at hand. The basic costs that all businesses should consider are; hardware and software costs, training and awareness costs, and incident response costs. Your business might need additional hardware and software, plus the cost to maintain such devices. Training employees on the use and importance of the program is very important, this could be a significant cost depending on the number of employees. But employees are the leading cause of data-breaches, so money spent here is well placed. Incident response costs include having a plan for how to respond, the cost of hiring professionals on your incident response team, and the cost of damages done by the cyber attack. A cybersecurity program does not have to cost a business a lot of money, but it does need to be prioritized. cybersecurity should not be overlooked by big or small businesses, they are both at about equal risks. A cybersecurity service provided to a company should cost about $1,300 to $3,000 per full-time employee. This should be about 10% of your IT budget or 0.9% of the company’s revenue. Keeping your businesses data secure clearly isn’t free, but the cost of not having an effective program for your business is more costly. In the U.S. alone, cyber crime is a 108 billion dollar a year crime spree. According to IBM’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, cyberattacks cost businesses $23,000 in downtime and $5,000 in lost business opportunities alone. Add that to the cost of professional services, repair or replacement of hardware and/or software, sky is the limit if a business is seriously effected by a cyber attack.

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The costs of developing a cybersecurity program for your business. (n.d.). https://www.thales-ld.com/the-costs-of-developing-a-cybersecurity-program-for-your-business/