As a business owner or member, you should make disaster recovery one of your top IT priorities. Why should you make it such a high-priority item? Data breaches and cyber threats are growing more severe, so you should change your mindset about data breaches from “if it happens” to “when it happens.” Once you transition to this mindset, you can start taking steps to minimize the cost of a data breach in your network.
The Financial Impact of Cyber Attacks
A 2019 report from IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute reveals that data breaches cost a global average $3.92 million, meaning the financial impact of a cyber attack can be devastating for your business. Do you want to spend $3.92 million to undo a data breach’s effects? Does your business have that kind of cash to spare? If you don’t, then you need to make investments in your network’s data protection.
It’s important to note that data breaches don’t occur equally around the world or across different industries. For example, healthcare is the most expensive industry for data breaches and cyber attacks, with an average of $6.54 million per cyber attack. Of all the countries surveyed in the IBM/Ponemon report, the U.S. experienced the most expensive attacks, with an average of $8.19 million per attack. Your business’s industry and your location can greatly affect the cost of a security breach when it occurs in your network.
How Data Breaches Affect Your Customers
What happens when your company gets hacked? It hurts your network infrastructure and your overall business operations, but that’s not all it does. It can also turn your customers into victims of identity theft. This happened to customers of First American Financial Corp. when their network experienced a breach that exposed 885 million records, including Social Security numbers and bank transactions. That type of breach can risk your customers’ safety by exposing private information, and this often results in lost business and major damage to your business’s reputation.
Handling the Aftermath of a Data Breach
After reading the statistics above, you may wonder what your company should do after a data breach occurs. If a breach occurs, you should prepare an incident response plan to address future breaches and cyber attacks because more of them are on the way. IBM and Ponemon looked at data breaches’ long-term effects, and their data breach report states that 67% of breached companies experience another breach within a year of the first one. 22% of these companies experience an attack within two years of the first incident, and 11% of them experience an incident within three years of the first attack. Once a breach occurs, you need to start assessing your network’s security measures immediately because your network will now be extra vulnerable for the next three years.
Do you want to spend $3.92 million to undo a data breach’s effects? Does your business have that kind of cash to spare? If you don’t, then you need to make investments in your network’s data protection.
How Can Disaster Recovery Measure Mitigate Breaches?
The disaster recovery process is all about bringing back your most critical functions after a disaster occurs. To avoid major data breaches that expose customer information, you need to gather the key stakeholders in your company and put plans and processes in place for what everyone should do when a breach or a cyber attack occurs. Make sure every team in your organization has processes in place to deal with cyber threats and that they’ve assigned specific tasks to certain team members who then mitigate the damage. Putting these plans in place will increase your data security because you’ll know exactly what to do when a cyber threat breaches your network security measures.
Improve Your Disaster Recovery Processes With CTMS
Data breaches could lead to regulatory fines for your business as well as many customer service problems. Avoid all those problems by partnering with CTMS. We help you set up the right disaster recovery measures for your business and for its industry so you can protect your customers’ and your network users’ information security. Reach out to us today to begin building the right processes to protect your network and help it recover from any kind of data breach. We have the disaster recovery solutions you need, and we implement them for you so you can focus on running your business.
