Dive Brief:

• Small- and medium-sized businesses across the globe are facing a high degree of cyber risk, with 48% of companies experiencing an incident over the past 12 months, according to research commissioned by Sage, a provider of payroll and financial software. 
• Three-quarters of SMBs in the U.S. say cybersecurity is a major concern and the majority, 59%, plan to increase investments in cybersecurity over the next year. The report shows that 91% of SMBs plan to either maintain existing investments or spend additional funds for cybersecurity over the next year. 
• SMBs are calling on cybersecurity specialist companies and trusted technology partners to help manage cyber risk. These companies also are looking to industry organizations for help with education and training on cyber risk management.

Dive Insight:

The Sage report highlights the continued cyber risk SMBs face. These organizations often lack internal security expertise or the resources to provide full time security protections or employee training. 

In the U.S. and Canada, up to 45% of SMBs consider education and awareness as their biggest challenge, Sage CISO Gustavo Zeidan said via email. 

“This indicates that access to required skills and having adequate resources to mitigate the risks are believed to be major gaps when compared to larger organizations with dedicated cybersecurity professionals and more resources available to them,” Zeidan said via email. 

The top cyber incidents SMBs face include distributed denial-of-service attacks, data loss, ransomware and credential theft, according to the report. 

The Sage report backs up prior research released in May from Proofpoint showing SMBs were being targeted for phishing and other malicious activity from advanced persistent threat actors. These attacks often targeted managed service providers, who tend to provide cybersecurity services to SMBs. 

The study is based on 2,100 online interviews with professionals at SMBs with less than 500 employees in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Canada and Australia.