IBM: Cost of an enterprise data breach hit post-pandemic high

Customer PII was involved in more breaches than any other type of record (46% of breaches).  IP may grow even more accessible as gen AI initiatives bring this data out in the open. With critical data becoming more dynamic and available across environments, businesses will need to assess the specific risks of each data type and their applicable security and access controls, Zorabedian wrote.

A recent Cisco study supported IBM’s results and found that 92% of organizations had deployed two or more public cloud providers to host their workloads and 34% using more than four, according to last year’s networking trends report.

“However, each public cloud service provider, private data center, and hybrid cloud environment uses different network and security operational models. Organizations need to address the resulting management complexity with a strategy that enables better visibility and more consistent control of connectivity and security across disparate private and public cloud environments,” Cisco stated.

Looking ahead to two years from now, 60% of companies expect to have an integrated multicloud networking and security management platform with common APIs for secure workload mobility, network and application visibility, and policy management, Cisco stated.

As for staff shortages, the problem continues to grow Zorabedian wrote. 

“53% of organizations facing a high-level skills shortage, up 26% from 2023. The industry-wide skills shortage could be expensive for organizations. Those with severe staffing shortages experienced breach costs that were $1.76 million higher on average than those with low-level or no security staffing issues,” Zorabedian wrote.