Johannesburg, 25 Oct 2021
A virtual event to be hosted by IMB, in collaboration with ITWeb, will reveal the findings of the 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report, highlighting the factors that increase and reduce the costs suffered by organisations around the world.
Speaking ahead of the virtual event, Camille Singleton, strategic cyber threat lead at IBM Security X-Force, says the average cost of data breaches had surged worldwide in the past year, showing the largest percentage increase in the 17-year history of the global report.
Based on in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches experienced by organisations, the study reveals that security incidents became more costly and harder to contain due to drastic operational shifts during the pandemic, with costs rising 15% for South African companies compared to the prior year.
“Interestingly, we found that Zero trust, security automation and having an incident response plan in place have a significant impact on the cost of a breach,” Singleton says.
“Zero trust is really a mindset where you assume a breach has already happened and therefore you implement very robust identity and access mechanisms for every user and device, including implementing multi-factor authentication, and also take an aggressive approach to implementing the principle of least privilege for every user.”
Singleton says Zero trust decreases the blast radius from an attack, so attackers are able to reach fewer systems, do less damage, steal less data or encrypt fewer resources.
“Zero trust is not a final end state, but rather more of a continuum. And on the continuum of zero trust, what the study found is that those who have not adopted this strategy at all had appreciably higher data breach costs compared to those who are in a mature stage of development. Adopting a zero trust mindset and getting an organisation onto the zero trust continuum can really help to bring down the cost of a data breach,” she says.
Despite the clear advantages, globally, 65% of companies have not deployed a zero trust approach – even partially, and close to half of organisations have no plans in place to deploy zero trust, she notes. This would lead to considerable losses, she revealed – noting that South African organisations with a mature zero trust strategy had an average data breach cost of R29 million – which was R25 million lower than those who had not deployed this approach at all.
Zero Trust Security Forum
26 October 2021
09:30 (GMT+2)
Duration: 60 minutes
The IBM Zero Trust Security Forum will give a full analysis of the latest global and local research into the costs of data loss, factors impacting the losses, and the industries suffering the greatest losses. It will also outline IBM’s approaches and building blocks for zero trust to transform the organisation’s security posture.
For more information and to register for this event, go to: https://www.itweb.co.za/event/ibm-security/
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