Some Real World Facts About Data Security Breaches

There are many challenges before organizations today; one of the most formidable ones is data security. This can be attributed to the fact that India itself faced a serious hike in the total average organizational cost of a data breach (R60.4 million in 2012). Moreover, it is revealed in a new Cost of Data Breach 2013 survey (by Symantec along with Ponemon Institute) that the major contributors to this are human errors and system problems. This survey covered almost 277 companies in nine countries (the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Australia and Brazil).

One of the major findings of this research was that the organizations that had a chief information security officer (CISO) and has stronger overall security programs did not incur huge costs. Along with intruders and external attackers that are a serious risk to the organizational data, the companies need to be vigilant about internal threats. Another study revealed that employee behavior is one of the major reasons for data breaches.

No matter where your mission-critical information is stored, you need to protect it with a holistic approach. Another source disclosed that malicious or criminal attacks are the most dreaded breach incidents, as they account for significant costs. The data for US and German companies showed that they incurred a cost of about R14,991 and R11,581 per compromised records respectively. On the contrary, Brazil and India incurred just around R3, 842, and R2, 489 per record, respectively.

It is incumbent on every organization to train and educate its employees. Moreover, the use of data loss prevention technology is necessary for preventing sensitive data from leaving your organization. To add to this, you need to add a layer of encryption or authentication to your confidential information. Further, you may choose to go for an incident response plan for minimizing the impact of the incident.

As the number of data breaches continues to increase, the security software industry needs to boom as well. Fortunately, the worldwide security software revenue got a hike of $1.5 billion in 2012 from the last year’s revenue of $17.7 billion.