Almost 90,000 SMEs in Ireland have had their data stolen in the last 12 months, according to the findings of a new survey by Irish tech company Datapac.
It reveals that 37% of small and medium sized businesses experienced a known cycberattack in the last year.
Looking ahead, 86% of SME business owners said are concerned that they will become a cybercrime target.
However, almost a quarter admit that they are not at all prepared to defend themselves against cybercrime.
Karen O'Connor, General Manager, Datapac said the survey has highlighted the "unprecedented" scale of cybercrime for SMEs in Ireland today.
"With over 4 in 10 of all Irish SMEs permanently losing mission-critical data over the past year and almost a third having data stolen, this can have significant and damaging repercussions for these businesses and their customers," Ms O'Connor said.
"The vast majority of business owners are concerned about being a cybercrime target, yet many still don’t seem to be taking the necessary steps to improve their protection," she added.
When it comes to cybercrime, Ms O'Connor said data backup is a vital component that shouldn't be overlooked.
"With almost three quarters of firms only backing up their data weekly or even less, this presents a huge challenge for businesses to maintain continuity after an incident," she said.
"In the likely event of a cyberattack, a robust backup and business continuity solution is the last line of defence and enables most businesses to recover quickly from business-critical data loss.
"Put simply, data cannot be recovered if it isn’t backed up effectively to begin with," she added.
When asked about the impacts of permanently losing data, over a quarter of those surveyed said they believe they would go out of business.
SME owners also said the loss of critical data would impede their business growth, damage their professional reputation, lead to regulatory consequences, contribute to employee attrition and result in the loss of some of their customers.
The survey of 150 SME business owners in Ireland was carried out last month by Censuswide, in association with Datapac and cybersecurity and backup specialist, Datto.
"The pandemic has permanently changed the way many organisations work, fundamentally altering where data is created and stored," said Nicholas O' Donovan, Sales Manager at Datto Ireland.
"A more dispersed workforce creates a larger network threat perimeter, which increases the risk of cyberattack.
"Wherever the data lives, be it in an on-premises server or in the cloud, it needs to be backed up with the highest frequency possible in a way that allows instant restoration for when disaster strikes," he added.
