Ponemon Institute IT Study | What Does a Data Breach Cost?

How much does your organization value protecting data from cybercrime? You’ve probably heard about many of the large corporations being exposed to data breach, and maybe you have had a meeting about the importance. Today we’d like to talk about a study that covers what happens when a data breach occurs. Ponemon Institute is an organization that researches data protection, privacy, and information security policy. Recently they put out a report on The Impact of Data Breaches on Reputation & Share Value. Here is some of what they found.

It Happens.

For this particular study, Ponemon surveyed 448 IT practitioners, 334 Senior level marketers and corporate communication pros, and 549 consumers. Out of the 448 IT practitioners, 43% said their organization had a significant data breach within the last 2 years. Out of the 334 CMO’s, 31% said the same thing. To be considered a significant breach, this refers to the loss of theft of over 1,000 records containing confidential and/or sensitive information of that of either the company, or their consumers.

It’s Costly.

Also involved in the study, Ponemon looked at an economic analysis of stock prices before, during, and after a significant data breach. For this part of the study, they selected 113 publicly traded benchmarked companies that experienced a data breach involving the loss of consumer or customer data.

These 113 companies experienced an average stock price decline of 5% IMMEDIATELY following the disclosure of the data breach.

From this point of drop, it also showed that if the company reported their security posture as superior and quickly responded found their stock recover after an average of a week. This varied greatly when referring to companies who had a poor security posture sat the time of the attack, and couldn’t respond quickly, who saw a stock price decline that lasted on average, around 3 months!

Superior IT Innovations can put necessary measures in place to ensure your data is backed up, and protected. In the event that something has happened, we are also able to recover lost data, by breach, infection, or ransomware.

Stay tuned for more information on the report coming from Pomenon, as well as other useful information on data security and IT management. If you need to talk to someone about what Superior IT Innovations can do for you to help your company protect vital data, simply give us a call or reach out via our contact form.