44% of Spanish SMEs suffered at least one cyber attack during 2021, as concluded in the sixth Cyberpreparation Report 2022 prepared by Hiscox, an insurance company that offers innovative and specialized products for companies and professionals.
This exposure leads 69% of these companies to view cybersecurity as highly critical to their ability to compete in their industry. So much so, that Spanish SMEs invested, on average, €152,000 in cybersecurity in 2021. This expense represents 23% of the total IT budget that Spanish SMEs invested on average in 2021, which in their case amounts to 663,929 euros.
When deciding which initiatives they are going to allocate that budget to, 60% of Spanish SMEs are committed to investing in dealing with existing threats and vulnerabilities, Enhance the security of customer-facing services and applications and ensure that your trading partners or vendors meet their own security requirements to prevent increasingly common attacks targeting supply chains. Next, as a spending priority, achieving and/or maintaining compliance with the regulations is positioned with 59% of the companies interested in this matter, followed by carrying out cybersecurity evaluations of the data and technology infrastructure (58%).
This investment in cybersecurity is essential if we take into account the cost that these cybersecurity incidents can have for companies: for an SME with 0 to 49 employees, the cost of all the cyberattacks suffered during the past year is 16,300 eurosa figure that amounts to 22,950 euros in the case of medium-sized companies with 50 to 249 employees.
This cost is also explained because, despite the fact that 61% of Spanish SMEs feel very confident about their cybersecurity preparation, the reality is that only 2% have the necessary cybersecurity knowledge to be considered cyber experts, while a third of them (34%) are considered cybernewbies
“Although traditionally cyberattacks have been more associated with large companies, the reality is that it is increasingly common for criminals to target smaller companies, so no one is immune and it is necessary to work actively to create a cybersecurity strategy . In this context, it is precisely that investment in cybersecurity that is gradually gaining positions on the list of company spending priorities, which is important“, says Nerea de la Fuente, Hiscox Iberia Underwriting Director.
