According to a study made by Cambridge University researchers in 2013, the global cost of debugging software has risen to $312 billion per year and that on average, software developers spend half of their programming time trying to find bugs and fix them. The study, which was a collaboration of Judge Business School at Cambridge University and Cambridge-based Undo Software “also conducted a survey that found that respondents who used reversible debuggers spent an average of 26% less time debugging when compared to developers using traditional, forward-only, debuggers,” according to Financial Content. 

Harm caused by dangerous bugs, which are often just small bits of code, is not usually “faced” by managers or the ones in control, even though software developers unfortunately are very familiar with the problems caused by bugs and how much precious time it takes to find and fix them.

Since the first computer worm in 1989 created by Robert Morris, incidents related to security issues have taken their toll and continue to happen to this day, albeit with an increased number of security threat cases. Many studies have in fact found that the cost of bugs will continue to increase in the coming years. Another interesting find is that the majority of the security issues come from within a company or organization.

“The damage they cause may include suspension of operations, loss of intellectual property, reputational harm, plummeting investor and customer confidence, and leaks of sensitive information to third parties, including the media. According to various estimates, at least 80 million insider attacks occur in the United States each year. But the number may be much higher, because they often go unreported. Clearly, their impact now totals in the tens of billions of dollars a year,” according to Harvard Business Review.

Malicious software ransomware has also become a problem during the recent years. A report by one-stop shop for cloud business applications Intermedia found out that fixing the damages caused by a ransomware attack can be way more expensive than paying a ransom to fix the problem and recover the company’s encrypted data. 72% of the affected companies by ransomware are not able to access the encrypted data for at least two days while 32% of companies can have an even harder time without being able to access their data for at least 5 days.

In most cases, paying a ransom can be a cheaper solution to solve the problem for most companies, as the restoration of data is more expensive and usually takes more time.

“You have to contain the infected systems, then wipe them completely and then restore them. That process in more than half these cases took longer than two days,” Intermedia senior vice president of security products Richard Walters said for TechNewsWorld. "If you pay the ransom, there's a one in five chance you won't get your data back,” Walters added.

Image Source: crmbusiness.wordpress.com