From lost business to regulatory fines and remediation costs, data breaches have far-reaching consequences. The annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by IBM Security, analyzes data breach costs reported by 507 organizations across 16 geographies and 17 industries.
The research showed that financial services experienced an average total cost of a data breach significantly higher than less regulated industries at $5.86 million versus an average of $3.92 million. In addition, it’s among the sectors that has more trouble than other industries retaining customers with abnormal customer turnover (greater-than-expected loss of customers) since the breach occurred at 5.9% versus 3.9% global average.
“Customers seem to be more willing to take their business elsewhere in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and financial services,” according to the report.
In terms of automating security, technology and financial services organizations have the highest percentage of full deployment of automation. This refers to enabling security technologies that augment or replace human intervention in the identification and containment of cyber exploits or breaches. Such technologies depend upon artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics and incident response orchestration.