You Lose Over Rs 5,000 Every Time An Indian Company's Data Is Hacked And Stolen

When it comes to data breaches, you're usually more worried about whether your data is compromised, or you need to change your account passwords.

But companies need to adopt better security, because breaches cost them a good chunk of money too.

IBM Security has published its 2019 'Cost of a Data Breach' report, which goes into how security lapses affect companies financially.

For instance, the average total cost of a data breach is a massive Rs 12.8 crore for Indian companies.

That's a 7.29 percent increase from last year's average of Rs 11.9 crore. Additionally, the average size of an Indian data breach is close to 40 percent higher than the global average While about 25,500 records are compromised in a single breach, specifically in Indian that's closer to 35,600 records per breach.

We also take longer than the global average to identify and fix a data breach, 298 days compared to 279. But while there's a per capita loss of about Rs 10,000 in data breaches globally, in India companies lose Rs 5,019 epr individual user compromised.

Currently, India ranks 15th in the world in terms of total cost of data breaches.

As for how breaches occur, a massive 51 percent of them in India are due to malicious attacks. However 27 percent are caused by system glitches, 22 percent by human error. And it's the industrial and pharmaceutical sectors that are most prone to these breaches in India.

IBM India's security software leader, Vaidyanathan Iyer, says cybercrimes targeting India are much more sophisticated and organised now.

"In the digital era, cognitive security can provide both speed and scale for organizations to go about their digital transformation journey with minimal business disruptions. Cognitive security is designed to augment human intelligence and paid security professionals. The technology learns with each interaction to proactively detect, analyze and provide actionable insights into threats."