Per Compromised Record Cost by Industry Classification
Average data breach cost for the 2017 financial year in US dollars.
*Source: Ponemon Institute’s 2017 ‘Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Overview’
The global total cost figure is made up of the unexpected and unplanned churn of customers, the time it takes to identify and contain the records involved and the cost of post-breach activities to prevent further losses.
Industries are financially impacted in different ways. The cost per comprimised record ranges from $380 in the Healthcare sector, to $71 in the Public sector with the global average at $141.
The Impact of GDPR
In addition to the internal financial impact, as new data protection laws are established (General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across Europe in May 2018), the threat of fines where inappropriate action has been taken to prevent data breaches must also be taken into consideration.
Given the financial threat and the opportunity for a data breach to impact your organisation to the point of failure, establishing good documentation about your PII is essential. It doesn’t need to be a scary or arduous task and should be seen as an opportunity to ensure your businesses ongoing success.
Most organisations cannot answer these basic questions about the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of their customers and prospects;
- What personal data do I have?
- Where is is within my orgnisation?
- Who has access to it?
- Why do we have it; what was the purpose it was collected for?
- How long have we held it for? How and when do we dispose of it?
- Who provided the permission for us to capture and store it?
- What is the risk to the business if it was to be accessed inappropriately?
How LINQ can help
LINQ provides a robust methodology and platform enabling you to gain the knowledge needed to manage your data risk.
LINQ can be applied to your personal data and information challenge immediately. Our system enables you to model data and information flow by capturing the relationships between actions, information, systems, and people. Through pivots and dashboards, you’ll have clear access to insights about how your business information flows.
Background to Data Privacy
Data and Information Privacy is a topic affecting any organisation in the world that collects, stores and processes data about its customers. The laws associated with Data Privacy such as The Data Protection Act in the UK, the General Data Protection Regulation across the European Union or the Privacy Act in New Zealand and Australia represent more than 100 countries around the world with such regulation.
The common theme is the protection of the rights of the individual who provided consent for you to have that information for a specific purpose.
As information needs have grown, and the digital economy demands more and more data from our customers to support our business processes, many organisations have been unable to keep up with the audit trail of their information pertaining to customers. Personally Identifiable Information is highly valuable data and is susceptible to being taken illegally through internal and external security breaches.