Reputation is a huge part of being able to conduct business. Your company can advertise all it wants, but if you don’t have a reputation for providing clients with the best product or service possible, you won’t be making very much money.
And while providing high-quality service is a great way to create buzz about your business, it can all be taken away with a simple breach of your company’s information. Study after study has shown that when a company is the victim of a data breach, its brand value invariably decreases.
How valuable is brand reputation?
A 2014 report created by Forbes and assisted by IBM showed that becoming the victim of a data breach can cause very real damage to a company’s reputation. The study found that 46 percent of organizations experienced damage to their company’s image as the result of a data breach. It also found that data breaches and theft were ranked as the most common threat to a business’s reputation.
What this data reveals is that clients don’t like the idea of doing business with a company that has become the target of cybercriminals. This is an expected response, considering the amount of personal information required to do business these days. No one wants to give information to a company with a track record of losing said information.
Additionally, the extent to which a company’s reputation is harmed can be substantial, depending on the type of breach and the industry the organization operates within. A Ponemon Institute study on the impact of data breaches on brand reputation found that following an attack on a company’s data center, the value of the company’s brand could decline anywhere between 17 percent to over 31 percent.
For the companies within the study, this translated to a decrease of brand value ranging from $184 million to $332 million. These staggering numbers are a testament to just how much reputation matters to your clients, and should make every business question its current data storage security.
Any company currently worried about its security should absolutely contact ISG Technology. Their team of highly trained security professionals can provide a Security Assessment to make sure your network is safe and secure. They also provide a Managed Firewall Solution, which blocks unsafe Web content and helps to keep the reputation your company has worked so hard to achieve.