The changing tides of business and technology continue to influence how data – and more importantly, data breaches – are handled by organizations. With more information than ever created on the Internet by transactions including banking, home, and retail purchases, the possibility of a data breach continues to increase.
On a yearly basis, we share the benchmark joint IBM-Ponemon data breach study, covering the cost and scope of data breaches year-over-year. 2017’s edition comprises of studies done over 419 companies in 13 countries with organizations serving industries including healthcare, financial, retail, transportation, and services. Among some of the key data points include:
- $3.62 million is the average total cost of data breach, a 10% decrease over 2016 due to a strengthened US Dollar.
- The average cost of a stolen record is $141, a decrease of $17 year-over-year. Healthcare data breaches are the most expensive, costing $380 per record. Public sector stolen records were the lowest, averaging $71 per record.
- The likelihood of a recurring material data breach over the next two years is 27.7%, a 2.1% increase from the year before.
- Almost half of organizations represented in this research (47 percent) identified the root cause of the data breach as a malicious or criminal attack, with malicious attacks costing $30 more per record than human error.
- The larger the data breach, the less likely the organization will have another breach in the next 24 months.
With this data in mind, data breaches appear to be a default occurrence. However, there are ways to mitigate impact of you are prepared correctly. Steps include:
- Understanding Your SLAs: More organizations than ever use cloud and understanding your service level agreements is crucial for preventing a mass data breach. Be sure to review every organization’s SLAs before entering into a trial subscription.
- Have a Communications Strategy: Sometimes it is months before an organization divulges a data breach, sometimes due to slow internal processes and other times because IT simply didn’t know. In either situation, lay out contingency communications plans so your customers know how to respond and resolve any privacy challenges.
- Implement Monitoring Software: The faster a data breach can be identified, the lower the cost. Year-over-year, Ponemon found that the mean time to identify and contain a data breach dropped to an average of 190 days for identification and 66 days for resolution. Having the right monitoring software and a resolution strategy both enable the cost of a breach to decrease.
You can read more of the report here.
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