Worldwide, businesses are spending more than ever to prevent and recover from data breaches. In its new "2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis," the Ponemon Institute and IBM found that breaches now cost companies $3.5 million-a 15% jump from last year. With an increase in the frequency of incidents, rising costs of notification and remediation, and lost business, the impacts from incidents show no sign of abating.
Researchers found that reputation and the loss of customer loyalty ultimately cause the most damage. Unfortunately, experts within most organizations are not seeing enough internal investment in security strategy. On average, they would like to see it doubled from about $7 million to $14 million.
There is good news, however. The study revealed that a strong incident response and crisis management plan decreased the breach costs significantly. Further, cyberinsurance is not the crutch that some suspect-companies with good cybersecurity practices are more likely to buy the insurance, and those doing so improved their internal safeguards against a breach.
Data Breach Costs on the Rise
|