Originally written by Stephanie Spicer on Small Business
Crisis control procedures need to be put in place to tackle incidents, such as cyber-attacks, extortion, industrial espionage and terrorism, which are costing UK SMEs billions of pounds a year and subsequent trading paralysis is putting thousands at risk of collapse in their aftermath.
UK SMEs paid out an average £6,416.50 last year, equating to a combined business cost of £8.8bn in 2018, to deal with crisis incidents, according to research by insurance broker and risk management consultants Gallagher,
24% of SMEs confirmed they were affected by a crisis event last year up 5% on the previous year 2017. 17% of SMEs affected by a crisis spent £10,000 or more to combat crises and 9% paid out in excess of £20,000. 23% said they would survive for less than a month if rendered unable to trade by a crisis incident.
This leads Gallagher to conclude that nearly 57,000 UK SMEs could be at risk of collapse this year in the aftermath of a crisis event if they don’t have crisis control in place.
The most prevalent crisis experienced by UK SMEs last year was a cyber-attack, data breach or cyber extortion incident, which accounted for 15% of

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