IBM Releases its Annual Cost of Data Breach Report - Seven Disturbing Trends

IBM has studied the data breach experiences of more than 2,000 organizations for some 11 years, the research has revealed the following seven megatrends: 1) Data breaches are now a consistent cost of doing business in the era of cybercrime. The evidence showed that this is a permanent risk organizations need to be prepared to deal with. It needs to be incorporated into data protection strategies, 2) The biggest financial consequence to organizations that experienced a data breach is lost business. Following a breach, enterprises need to take steps to retain customers’ trust to reduce the long-term financial impact, 3) Most data breaches continue to be caused by criminal and malicious attacks. These breaches also take the most time to detect and contain. As a result, they have the highest cost per record, 4) Organizations recognize that the longer it takes to detect and contain a data breach, the more costly it becomes to resolve. Over the years, detection and escalation costs in our research have increased. This suggests investments are being made in technologies and in-house expertise to reduce the time to detect and contain a threat, 5) Highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare have the most costly data breaches because of fines and the higher-than-average rate of lost business and customers, 6) Improvements in data governance initiatives will reduce the cost of data breach. Incident response plans, the appointment of a CISO, employee training and awareness programs and a business continuity management strategy result in cost savings, and 7) Investments in certain data loss prevention controls and activities such as encryption and endpoint security solutions are important for preventing data breaches. Which data breaches would have the biggest effect on your organization? Share your anonymous comments with the Cloud and Cyber Security Center.