Dive Brief:

• According to a new report from Kaspersky Lab, recovery costs for a security incident that involves virtual machines in either a public or private cloud environment can be double those that occur in a traditional environment.

• Enterprises paid an average of $800,000 to recover from a security breach involving virtualization, compared with $400,000 in traditional environments.

• Small and mid-sized businesses had costs rise from an average of $26,000 to $60,000 with virtualization.

Dive Insight:

Part of the reason behind the higher costs is that virtualization is often used for mission-critical processes. When that infrastructure goes down, so do those processes.

"There are quite a big number of respondents who said that during the cyber incident, they lost access to business-critical data," said Andrey Pozhogin, senior product marketing manager at Kaspersky Lab.

According to the survey, 66% of respondents said that they lost access to business critical information during an incident involving virtualization, compared to 36% in a traditional environment.

Companies are also often not as prepared to recover from an incident that involves virtualization, so those incidents can result in higher costs related to lost business, damage to company reputations, damage to credit ratings, and increased insurance premiums, the study said.