Businesses pay twice the cost for virtual breaches

Virtual infrastructures are more expensive to repair than physical infrastructures after a security breach, says a new Kaspersky Lab report.

This was among the major findings in the report, which was investigating the Security of Virtual Infrastructure and featured conclusions from 5,500 global businesses.

Larger enterprises were forced to pay an average of over £507,000 as a result of security incidents to do with virtual infrastructures, while attacks that involved just physical infrastructure proved half as costly.

Kaspersky Lab corporate products group manager Matvey Voytov said:

“Businesses expect that going virtual will drive down their IT spend and streamline their infrastructure. However, the survey results show us that if there is not enough attention paid to security matters in the virtual environment, expenses may exceed the benefit.”

For SMEs, the average cost was £38,000 for every virtual infrastructure attack and £16,400 per physical attack.

Kaspersky proposes that these figures are derived from the fact that it is more common for a virtual network to be employed in a mission-critical operation, and although a physical nodes attack results in lost access to vital data in 36% of cases, it increases to 66% when virtual servers or desktops are involved.

Maintaining ownership of critical data is one of the most important tasks for the modern business, especially those with a heavy reliance on technology. Businesses need to give more thought to their IT security recruitment strategy, as having the right infrastructure in place is one thing, but having the right staff is equally valuable.