The Real Cost of a Cyber Incident for a Small Business

Security vendors love quoting dramatic breach statistics. We won't — averages from giant-enterprise studies tell a 15-person company very little. What's more useful is understanding the structure of incident costs, because every line applies regardless of company size.

Line item 1: Downtime

When ransomware hits, work stops. Not partially — invoicing, email, customer files, production systems. The cost is your daily revenue multiplied by recovery time, and recovery without prepared backups is measured in days or weeks, not hours. For most SMBs this single line dwarfs everything else.

Line item 2: Recovery itself

Emergency incident response is the most expensive way to buy security expertise. Specialists engaged mid-crisis, systems rebuilt from scratch, data reconstructed — all at urgency pricing, all unbudgeted.

Line item 3: The ransom question

Companies without restorable backups face a choice no one should face: pay criminals (with no guarantee), or lose the data. Companies with tested backups don't face it at all. That difference costs $5.80 per endpoint per month (Backup & Disaster Recovery) and $3.90 per seat per month for Microsoft 365 data.

Line item 4: Customers and contracts

B2B customers increasingly require security evidence from suppliers, and an incident can trigger contractual notification duties, lost renewals, and failed vendor assessments. Trust is slow to build and fast to lose — and unlike systems, it doesn't restore from backup.

Line item 5: Regulatory exposure

Depending on your jurisdiction and data, incidents can carry notification obligations and penalties under frameworks like GDPR or sector rules. (Whether and how these apply to you is a legal question — ask your counsel.)

The other side of the ledger

Now the comparison. Around-the-clock detection and response — the capability that catches an intrusion before it becomes the scenario above — starts at $9.20 per endpoint per month. A complete stack including EDR is $35.00 per endpoint per month. For a 20-endpoint company, that's $190–$600 a month against an incident whose first line item alone is days of stopped revenue.

This isn't fear marketing. It's an asymmetry every business owner can price out on a napkin with their own numbers.

FAQ

We're too small to be a target, right?

Small companies are attacked precisely because attackers expect weaker defenses and faster payouts. Automation means attackers don't choose targets by size — scanners do.

What's the single highest-impact first step?

Tested backups plus 24/7 monitoring — the combination that removes the ransom dilemma and shortens detection time.

How do we start?

Browse the packages, submit a request, and our team responds within 24 hours with a plan.

Price it for your company →