Cybersecurity incidents have a human side, and may contribute to a negative work experience too – in fact, that has already happened in around half of SMBs (48 per cent) and enterprises (53pc) that experienced at least one data breach last year. That’s according to a report by the cyber product company Kaspersky, on the personal consequences that IT and IT security managers face when they have to clean up after a company data breach.
Stress is the most likely ramification: a third (33pc) of administrators fell into much more stress than they would usually – regardless if they were working in a big enterprise with advanced incident response practices, or in a medium-sized business without a dedicated IT security department.
After a data breach, IT and IT security have to investigate the incident, clean up and fix the system, and take measures to prevent this attack being repeated. As a result, about a third of managers worked over night or had to incur overtime at work (33pc for SMBs and 32pc for enterprises). It can also lead to other tasks and deadlines being pushed back in more than a quarter of both SMBs (27%) and enterprises (26%). And all this in addition to missing personal events, like a grandmother’s birthday or a date night with a fiancé, as experienced by 20% of IT professionals in SMBs and 30% in enterprises.
Alena Reva, Vice President, Human Resources Americas, Kaspersky says: “When talking about cybersecurity incidents in business, we often focus on what it costs to companies – like money, customer trust and other corporate consequences. But there is another aspect to consider; how employees live through such cases.
“It’s needless to say that additional stress at work or a disrupted work-life balance affects employee’s productivity and, even more critically, their mental and physical health. This shouldn’t be underestimated, because this can affect business too if staff members share their negative feelings outside the organisation – impairing its reputation and brand as an employer. This can be especially critical for a business walking through a data breach when its wider reputation is already under attack.”
See also the Kaspersky blog; did you have a chance to train your employees in the basics of information security before sending them off to work from home? And visit securelist.com.
