As I open my email each morning, I am overwhelmed by the number of blogs that over the years I must have subscribed to. Much like cleaning out my closet--or maybe my email inbox--I always put off the task unsubscribing to many of these. But, occasionally, something catches my eyes, and I jot down a comment, or statistic that I think is worth sharing.

As I was reading a few articles at Infosecurity Magazine, a few things stood out.

• Data breach incidents involving the loss or theft of data-bearing devices increased per record cost by as much as $18 per record.
• Data loss resulting from a malicious or criminal attack yielded the highest cost at an average of $246 per compromised record, followed by system glitches and employee mistakes resulting in an average per record cost of $171 and $160, respectively.

The same data shows malicious or criminal attacks as the most frequently encountered root cause of data breaches by organizations. To continue on:

• Forty-four percent of respondents stated the main cause of data breach was a malicious or criminal attack against the organization.
• Thirty-one percent of organizations say employee negligence (a.k.a. human factor) and 25 percent say system glitches were the main causes of the data loss.
• Almost two thirds of those attacks were made possible by the use of weak, default, or stolen passwords. Finally, insider and privilege misuse accounted for nearly 16% of the breaches. The latter normally took months or years to discover.

Probably the most eye opening statistic that I uncovered according to Financial Computer, Inc., nearly 60% of Small Business that suffered a major cyber attack closed within 6 months. Other studies show that only3 out of 4 of businesses typically recover from a crippling data loss that lasts more than ten days.

Is your organization prepared? How confident are you? Are you prepared to bet your company’s future on it?

V-Soft can offer a comprehensive Cyber Security Assessment, Road Map and ongoing support. Please contact your V-Soft account manager to find out more about these services.

About the Author

Mark McBee is a 25-year IT industry veteran. He was a founding member of a $250MM National VAR and a managing partner and COO for a regional Managed Service Provider. During that time he was on the partner advisory boards of Lenovo, HP printing and Imaging and Okidata. He currently serves as Vice President of Managed Services/Cloud Services for V-Soft Consulting.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn today.