Is the Cost of a Breach Becoming Yet Another Cost of Doing Business?

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

• The steady rise of data breaches poses a danger that C-level executives will come to view those as a cost of doing business.
• But with those costs on the rise, organizations can’t afford the price tag, and they have to get better at managing risks in the new reality of mobility, cloud computing and consumerization of IT.

A few years ago at RSA I met an auditor who told me that at the time a lot of organizations that she dealt with considered fines from non-compliance with regulatory mandates to be part of the cost of doing business.  With the frequency in the number of breaches associated with such lapses in compliance increasing at a steady clip, are we approaching a time when organizations will view the cost of breaches as yet another part of the cost of doing business?  Have some organizations reached that conclusion already?  The Identity Theft Resource Center reported that breaches increased by 30% in 2013 over 2012 across a range of industries, with its total number of breaches reported at 619.  The total number of records exposed were 57,868,922, which included the 40 million reported by Target.