Being hit with a data breach is not cheap. The Ponemon Institute and IBM did a study to determine the costs and it’s not pretty. The average cost of a data breach has gone up over $1.2 million within the last year. The average per record cost is $158 for most organizations. For healthcare records, the number skyrockets to $355 per record.
Unfortunately, the cost of identifying and responding to data breaches is included in the cost of doing business these days and the longer companies wait to contain one, the more expensive. Therefore, having an incident response plan (IRP) and team in place is worth the effort.
An IRP should be thorough and well thought out. It should include a roles and responsibilities list with clearly defined tasks that each person on the list should perform in the case of a breach, malware outbreak, denial of service attack or any other number of IT security incidents. Details to reach those team members at any time of the day should be included and kept updated at all times. Add in sections for communicating the news to customers, members, or clients, as well as vendors, partners, and the media. These plans should be reviewed and updated at least annually and when a team member is added or removed or when contact details change.
The report found that the cost of containing a breach if identified within 100 days can save the organization $1 million. However, IBM and Ponemon found that the average time to identification is about 201 days. So having security defense technology and training in place is important too so that this will be avoided in the first place.
For banks and credit unions
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