How much does spam cost your business?

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You already know that spam, viruses, and other malicious attacks on your business’s network are incredibly frustrating, and can put sensitive information at risk. But, have you ever considered how much an attack actually costs?

In the article, we’ll help you wrap your head around the many detrimental outcomes that can come from spam emails, including lost productivity and funds.

Resources consumed by spam

Most business have an email system, which is used by staff to contact customers, clients, and other staff members.

Consider how many spam emails you receive per day, week, and month. Even if you receive just 10 spam emails per day, that’s 70 emails per week, and 310 emails per month. After one year, your inbox will be inundated with almost 4,000 spam emails. And what’s more, most of us receive more than 10 junk emails per day – in fact, the average person receives 21 spam emails each and every day.

Each of these spam emails take up valuable space in your email system, space that you pay for.

So, how much does that actually cost? Here’s a quick calculation you can follow.

1. Calculate how much your email storage has increased in the past year.
2. Calculate the approximate number of spam emails you receive in one year. The best way to do this is to look one week, and then multiply that by 52.
3. Check the average size of a junk email, and multiply that by the total yearly spam emails received.
4. Compare the size of the spam emails received with the growth of your email storage. That should give you a rough idea of how much your business has needed to invest to cater for spam emails.

Time wasted by spam

Time is money, and wasted time is money lost.

Here’s another calculation. Even with spam filtering, the average person receives 21 spam emails per day, and spends one minute dealing with them, that’s five minutes each week.

Sounds like nothing, right? Well, consider this.

Over the course of one year, the average employee spends more than 4 hours dealing with spam emails. This wasted time costs business upwards of $200 per staff member. Even small businesses with just 5 staff members are up for more than $1,000 per year – all because of spam emails.

What if a security breach is successful?

In addition to the consumed resources and wasted time, spam emails can result in serious security breaches. If that does occur, there are many costly consequences:

• Stolen data. As well as taking time to restore, stolen data can cause a serious productivity issue, and depending on your business, can cause your client base to lose trust in your business.
• Affected hardware. Spam emails can result in viruses and other malicious attacks. These can cause computers in your business’s network to stop working. In the worst-case scenario, affected computers can never be restored, and will need to be replaced.
• Wasted time. Lost data and no access to computers can take a serious toll on your employees’ ability to get work done. Forget wasting just one minute per day – you could be looking at an entire working week gone.
• Other costs. In addition to the above, you may have to pay a professional to do virus and malware removal to restore your computers, or pay a hefty ransom fee if your network is infiltrated by ransomware.

The total cost of spam

As you can see, the total cost of spam is a whole lot more than you may have initially thought. Of course, it depends on the size and nature of your business, but even small businesses with just a couple of email users can be up for hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars every year.