Introduction
Businesses play a vital role in society comprehensively. These businesses had created many innovations and advancements in human life and had also faced a range of challenges for growing up. As a business grows different problems arise at different peak of time which needs to be solved accurately. Time had changed so much, the world had now entered into technology and technology had entered every dimension of human life which includes the corporate world too. Traditional issues which arise earlier during the growth of businesses are- (i) keeping up with the market, (ii) planning ahead, (iii) maintaining cash flow, (iv) availability of the right systems, (v) welcoming change, and (vi) attracting and holding customers but along with these due to the indulgence of technology many modern issues had risen too. Christian Louse Lange rightly said, “technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” Though technology had made everything effortless, fast, and precise but it had gave birth to many technological risks also like – (i) data breach, (ii) user access, (iii) third-party risk, (iv) disaster recovery, (v) availability risk and so on. Amongst all of these data breach had became the top most concern for business world, even according to a survey from Protiviti and ISACA IT leaders in North America, Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Oceania ranked data breach as first technological concern for 2021.
When one or more individuals are permitted to read data that they are not authorized to access then a ‘data breach’ occurs. Once an individual reads the data he/she might steal it and make changes to it. It can have an adverse and long-lasting impact on the growth of business. Data breach takes very less time to occur, in fact according to data from Verizon 93% of successful data breaches happen in less than one minute yet 80% of businesses couldn’t realize when data breach happened. That is why 86% of business executive presumes cyber security threats are concerning.
Factors increasing the risk of Data Breach
The 2021 IBM report stated that data breach costs rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million (it is highest average total cost in 17 years). Surprisingly 70% of all cyberattacks target small and medium sized businesses as founded by National Cyber Security Alliance. Sherri Davidoff in her book ‘Data Breaches: Crisis and Opportunities’ had mentioned 5 risks of Data Breach. They are:
- Access: Data breach increases the number of people to have access to the data.
- Data Retention: Risk of data breach increases with the amount of time that data is retained. Many companies retain data indefinitely which elevates risk of data breach.
- Data breach risk also increases with the existing number of copies of the data. Many organizations have dozens of copies of same data.
- Liquidity: Technology had made to transfer the data from one place to another and to process it very quickly and effortlessly. This had also increase risk of data breach.
- Value: Data breach also increases with the value of information as that gives criminals incentives to target it. Also emergence of dark web has flourished the risk of data breach.
Consequences of Data Breach
Data breach does not only cost loss of data it also costs huge devastating long-term losses some of them are:-
1. Regulatory Fines: Regulatory bodies may put huge fines on companies if they fail to protect their customers’ data. However consequences may differ depending on place of business setup and what statues the breach falls under like- Australian Privacy Principles or Federal data protection law in the US.
2. Investigation Costs: Often many victim companies couldn’t recognize data breach for several weeks. This proves how difficult it is to find out data breach and investigating it is essential to fix vulnerabilities and prevent future data breaches. These investigations took so much time and money too.
3. Security improvement costs and downtime: Though investigations took huge time and money but fixing the vulnerabilities also costs much. Also business might experience downtime as a result if servers need to be taken offline. This throws a double impact on business, firstly to pay for security fixes and secondly losing working hours to operational downtime.
4. LoLong-termoss of trust: Data breaches can shake the confidence of customers oninour company and may lead them to turn towards competitors (if they feel secure there). This loss of confidence leads to a loss of companies’ reputation along with loss of customers and loss of revenue.
5. Loss of intellectual property: Data breaches cannot be only of customers’ data but also companies’ valuable or sensitive data can be stolen. Valuable data such as – contracts, reports, blueprints or plan could be held to ransom, sold to competitors or even made public which can cause severe loss of intellectual property.
6. Online vandalism: Sometimes hackers might present them as pranksters and change few words on your website. Although this seems less harmful but it can actually cause a lot of damage like – they may add vulgar content to some web pages which can degrade companies’ reputation.
Practices to avoid Data Breach
Maintaining digital security is the only way to avoid data breach though it takes time and effort but it’s quite helpful. Some useful steps are: -
- Define a security policy: Every business from smallest to largest should improve security posture by creating an effective strategy that will help to minimize the risk of data breach.
- Educate Employees: Providing training and education to employees from time to time to handle data, can make a significant change. Staffs should be regularly updated on the latest cyber security developments.
- Use of right security technology: - Usage of right security technology can play a major role in protecting companies’ data. Always ensure to use updated version of security software.
- Conduct Regular Testing: - Conducting network vulnerability assessment enables you to improve your security.
- Manage access and authentication: - Rules should be made that require employees to use strong passwords and change them frequently. Also two step authentication process can be carried out which requires both password and another identity verification code sent on employees’ device for verification.
- Companies should assure that if they are working with any third-party vendors then they must also hold appropriate security measures.
- If employees use their own devices at work then rules should be required that allow them to use a password or PIN code for login in.
- Data minimization i.e. collecting only required data can also reduce the risk of data breaching.
Conclusion
Modern problems require modern solutions hence technological risks like data breaching needs a modern solution like digital security. It is notable that the corporate world had faced many vulnerabilities and in this technological era ‘cyber security problems’ had become the prior most concerning issue for them. The solution lies in the problem itself; likewise the loopholes created by technology can only be fixed by technology. It is the need of hour that the corporate world deal with data breaching intelligently by strengthening their cyber security in the coming era.