As a global leader in enterprise data protection, PGP Corporation sponsored the annual report from The Ponemon Institute: U.K. Cost of a Data Breach Study.

The report indicates that organisations have made significant progress in controlling the post-breach responses, both the overall and per-customer costs of a breach continue to rise compared to previous studies.

Among the key findings in the 2008 study:

• Total costs continue to increase: The total average costs of a data breach grew to £60 per record compromised, an increase of 28 percent since 2007 (£47 per record).
• Breaches are costly events for an organisation, the average total cost per reporting company was more than £1.73 million per breach (up from £1.42 million in 2007) and ranged from £160,000 to over £4.8 million.

2008 was the year of the public data breach in the United Kingdom. The independent authority responsible for Data Protection in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office reported over 277 breaches of significant volume since the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) breach in November 2007.

The range of incidents and the data lost is staggering. The first incident to raise serious public concern was the loss by HMRC of 2 discs containing records on over 20 million UK citizens. Subsequently we saw USB sticks being mislaid with data on military personnel, passwords to the Government’s online portal and the details on all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales, a breach which cost PA Consulting their £1.5 million contract with the Home Office.

It is not only public sector organisations that have been affected – companies such as Marks and Spencer, Associated Newspapers and Virgin Media have all had public data breaches revealed.

These incidents have to led to public demand for greater data protection and possible data breach notification laws, though the Information Commissioners Office is reluctant to go down this route. However we see that companies are increasingly announcing breaches voluntarily, in order to minimise customer disquiet and to better manage the various regulatory authorities.

“As we can see from 2008, data breaches are not going away, and they continue to hit corporations, and ultimately consumers, in the wallet,” says Phillip Dunkelberger, president and CEO of PGP Corporation. “U.K. businesses can’t afford to give their customers any reason to go elsewhere in this current economic climate. The cost of putting proactive tools in place to protect sensitive data far outweighs the cost of having a breach.”

Find Out More

To read the summary report findings of this Ponemon Institute report, click here

To receive the full report, free of charge, click here

To learn more about PGP solutions for enterprise data protection and how EJC can help you defend your data click here.