Data Breaches, a phrase that’s been heard more and more often in the UK every year. 2025 ended with big names like Jaguar Land Rover and M&S hitting the news headlines for falling victim to cyber attacks. Have you ever wondered about the recovery time and costs of a data breach for a standard business, though? A recent report from Absolute Security compiled data from a poll of 750 CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) in the UK and the US. Let’s cover what the findings are.
According to the analysed data from the poll, 98% of respondents spent between $1-5 million to recover from a breach, the average being $2.5 million. This figure would include the costs of downtime, potentially lost business, potential fines from data protection laws, and implementing the solution to recover from the breach.
However, the true cost of a breach extends beyond the initial recovery. For many businesses, especially small to mid-sized organisations, this cost can be extremely difficult to recover from in itself, turning what might seem like a single cyber incident into a long-lasting operational and commercial challenge. In the words of an Absolute Security spokesman, “prolonged downtime can literally crush a business”.
The majority of respondents (57%) claimed their organisation took 3–6 days for full endpoint remediation and recovery following an incident, with a fifth (19%) revealing these efforts lasted 7–14 days. During this time, IT teams are often forced to divert resources away from day-to-day operations, delaying projects and impacting overall productivity. Prolonged recovery periods can result in ongoing service disruption, frustrated users, and increased pressure on internal IT staff, all while the business works to ensure systems are fully secured and the threat has been completely removed.
Overall, data breaches are detrimental. That isn’t shocking news, but putting a £ number to it puts the impact into perspective. Businesses need to invest in strong in-house or external cyber security products, training and policies. As evident from this report, the cost of all of those things will still be much cheaper in the long term than a data breach.
