Whilst larger businesses are likely to invest both the finances and the staff in tightening up on their IT security, a survey has found that almost half of small business owners allocate less than 5% of their budget to it.
The research was carried out by Lancaster University with the ICT KTN. The University is one of the first eight to be awarded the Government’s Academic Cyber Security Centre of Excellence Status. Its Security Lancaster department carries out research into cyber security threats and educates the leaders and strategists of the future.
Mitigate works closely with educators and researchers there to stay at the forefront of the challenge and help businesses to protect their systems.
A ‘leave it till tomorrow’ approach was revealed amongst the small businesses as 98% of respondents confirmed that cyber security is a high priority for them and yet only 43% had put an IT security policy in place. What did motivate the respondents, however, was protecting customer data (34%), complying with laws and regulations (15%), business continuity (11%) and preventing system downtime and outages (11%).
