DATA breaches cost South African companies R46 million on average due to operational shifts during the Covid-19 pandemic – the highest cost in the six-year history of the report, an IBM Security study reveals.
The 2021 report found that the average time to detect and contain a data breach was at its highest in six years for organisations in South Africa, taking 237 days (184 to detect and 53 to contain).
The report, also from the Ponemon Institute, is based on an analysis of real-world data breaches of 100 000 records or less, experienced by more than 500 organisations worldwide between May 2020 and March 2021
Companies that contained a breach in under 200 days were revealed to save almost R7m. On average, it cost organisations R2 300 per lost or stolen record. Data breaches in the financial, industrial and services industries were the most expensive by industry, costing R1 548 per record.
Security incidents became more costly and harder to contain due to drastic operational shifts during the pandemic, with costs rising by 15 percent for South African compared to the previous year.
Businesses were forced to quickly adapt their technology approaches last year, with many companies encouraging or requiring employees to work from home, and 60 percent of organisations moving further into cloud-based activities during the pandemic.
Security may have lagged behind the rapid IT changes, hindering organisations’ ability to respond to data breaches, the study found.
“Organisations in South Africa are faced with a growing remote workforce which results in sensitive data moving across less controlled environments making it more vulnerable to a data breach. This increases the need to safeguard sensitive data at rest and in transit,”, says Sheldon Hand, the data, AI, automation and security business unit leader for IBM Southern Africa.
On average, it took 214 days to identify data breaches and 52 days to contain it in organisations with more than 50 percent remote work adoption, while compromised business emails were the most common method of attack of breaches in the study, costing organisations more than R71m on average.
Modern approaches reduced costs. The adoption of AI, encryption, incident response testing and cyber resilience were the top mitigating factors shown to reduce the cost of a breach, saving companies between R2.7 million and R3.3m compared to those who did not have significant usage of the tools.
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE