The study – sponsored by IBM and carried out by the Ponemon Institute – suggests that a radical rethink in the way businesses prioritise and plan their IT security strategies.
The survey took in 115 responses from CEOs at UK businesses and, says IBM, looked to get an idea of how companies are changing their IT security strategies in the face of a barrage of cyber attacks and high-profile data breaches.
The most interesting aspect of the research, Infosecurity notes, is that the average cost of each data breach was estimated at £112 per compromised record, and the average cost savings or revenue improvements resulting from data protection programmes totalled £11 million.
Equally interesting is that all the respondents to the survey said that their companies had their IT systems attacked at least once in the past year, with 77% saying they had endured a data breach at some point.
As a result, 76% of the CEOs said that they now view reducing potential security flaws in their business-critical applications as the single most important aspect of their IT security plan.
Commenting on the results, Larry Ponemon said: "In the face of growing security threats, business leaders are finally recognising that a strong data protection strategy plays a critical role to their bottom line."
"Once viewed as purely a technical issue, the responses garnered in our survey highlight a shift in how organisations are treating their investments in security software", he said.
Comments
Courion says:
29 March 2010
The data from the Ponemon Institute once again serves as a stark reminder of the real world costs of lax data security.
Failure to clamp down on data security has real and painful consequences for any organisation, regardless of whether it is a public or private sector body. Data breaches cost jobs, create catastrophic bad press and can have a painful impact on the bottom line.
Coupled with the new powers of the Information Commissioner’s Office to fine companies in the UK upwards of £500,000 for each instance of a data protection failing, and the final overall cost of a breach or loss could very quickly dwarf the £4.1 million ($6.75 million) average per incident revealed by the Ponemon Institute earlier this year.
The financial impact of the breaches examined in this report underline the growing value of data as a business asset. The Ponemon Institute revealed that the most expensive data breach event in the last year cost a company nearly £19 million to resolve, the cheapest being £463,000. In the previous survey, these figures were £3.8 million and £84,000 respectively – a massive jump in just a year.
This increase is a likely knock-on effect of two years of reduced headcount and focus around data governance among some organisations. This in turn has lead to information assets being lost, stolen and exploited due to a lack of oversight. Fortunately, as the report shows, investment is increasing as companies look to correct such oversights before they become systemic.
Stuart Hodkinson, UK general manager, Courion
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