Internet Security Learning Center

Network Downtime From Attack Has Companies Losing Revenue

Large organizations lose about 2.2 percent of annual revenue, over $30 million, to network security attacks, while small and medium organizations lose about 0.5 percent of annual revenue to attacks, potentially in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, concludes a new Infonetics study. Infonetics says that if small- and medium-sized businesses were more capable of monitoring their downtime, these results would reflect bigger losses. "There are targeted security solutions available for organizations of every size, and I think once they see just how much money they're losing due to security attack downtime they'll be more interested in making special investments to put a stop to it," says Infonetics analyst Jeff Wilson. The study showed that over half of downtime costs for all organizations is a result of service degradation, as opposed to outright outages, much of which is "hidden downtime" resulting from unreported degradations; medium-sized organizations have the most trouble with malware, large organizations with denial-of-service attacks and server malware, while small organizations are affected by all three types of attacks. Spyware presents a major challenge to small and medium organizations, accounting for 40 percent of all security downtime in medium organizations.

© Copyright 2007 INFORMATION, INC.