Thirty-three percent of respondents said they believe a major data loss incident involving accidental or malicious distribution of confidential data could put them out of business.
The research also suggests that while awareness regarding the danger of breaches is high, the problem continues to grow. Sixty percent of respondents said they had experienced a data breach in the past year, and only six percent of respondents could say with certainty that they had not experienced one in the previous two years. However, despite the prevalence of breaches, enterprises are still devoting just a fraction of their IT budgets to the problem. On average respondents spend just one-half of one percent of their overall IT budgets on data security.
- A data breach that exposed personal information would cost companies an average of $268,000 to inform their customers-even if the lost data is never used
- Sixty-one percent of respondents think that data leakage is the doing of insiders, and 23 percent believe those leaks are malicious
- Nearly half (46 percent) of respondents don't debrief or monitor employees after they have given notice that they are leaving the company
- Twenty-three percent of respondents were able to estimate the total annual cost of data leakage, and the average figure they gave was $1.82 million
- Respondents rated loss of intellectual property and financial information as the two most valuable classes of data-with the average estimated cost of leaked financial data reaching $1.68 million.