The 12
th annual
Cost of Data Breach Study was recently released by the Ponemon Institute, which provides benchmark research each year. The organizations included in this research experienced data breaches ranging from approximately 2,600 to slightly fewer than 100,000 compromised records. A compromised record is "one that identifies the natural person whose information has been lost or stolen in a data breach."
The Ponemon Institute points out a shocking fact that the chances of an organization experiencing a data breach is
one in four. According to IBM's "
Cost of Data Breach Calculator," which presents results from the study, organizations in the United States will incur an average of $7.3 million (both direct and indirect costs) as a result of a breach of the average size of 24,000 records. That cost level is more than double the global average. For the last three years, the top cost-reducing factor is to have either an internal or external incident response team to be able to address any possible breach in a timely manner to avoid further damages.
It's essential to be proactive and implement procedures and processes to decrease chances of a security breach by staying
up-to-date with available protection. For more on corporate data breaches, see Concurrency’s list of
worst corporate hacks in recent years.