Data breaches are a terrifying reality for every company that does business on the internet—which is all of them.
No matter what endpoint protection, encryption, and security you put in place, there's always a chance your sensitive customer information might be part of the next trove of data to leak online. There are all sorts of things not to do when your poor server is the one that's breached, but one way or another, it's going to cost you.
According to the latest Cost of a Data Breach study by IBM and the Ponemon Institute, in the US, the average incident could cost a company upwards of $7.9 million. The 13th annual report found that the global average cost of a data breach is up 6.4 percent over the previous year to $3.86 million, and the average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information also increased by 4.8 percent year over year to $148 per record.
The US notched the highest average data-breach cost in the world by a wide margin. The next most expensive average cost by country is Canada at $4.74 million, followed by Germany at $4.67 million, France at $4.227 million, and the UK at $3.68 million. A big question a year from now will be how the implementation of GDPR and its strict penalties related to data-breach disclosure will affect these numbers, not only in EU countries but around the world.
One thing companies can do to decrease risk is to protect themselves by correcting avoidable mistakes. While the majority of data breaches cited in the report were the result of hacking, a staggering 25 percent of breaches came down to simple human error.
Don't be the next Equifax.