Data Breach After Effects: Consequences and Learning Lessons

If you think your organization is safe from a data breach, think again. Data breaches could be deadly for any organization big or small.

Consequences

On average, it takes an organization over 197 days to detect a security incident. That’s over 6 months. Consider how much damage has been done in that time… Thousands (if not millions) of records could be compromised. 

Several organizations have and will suffer from a data breach, and will suffer in many ways. The worst effect for an organization would have to be financial. There are so many costs associated when a data breach occurs, including compensating the affected customers, or event hiring a third-party of paying security staff overtime.  Even after paying off financial debts, organizations will suffer major damage to their reputation. Retaining a potential and current customer’s trust can be very hard in a post-mortem data breach, especially if the breach was widespread. 

Learning Lessons

Regardless of the outcome of a data breach, it’s important to reflect on what was learned, and steps to ensure another data breach does not occur in the future. We nailed down three key learning lessons anyone could learn from a data breach (whether you have been involved in a data breach or not):

1. Have Clear Communication: Consider communications to potential victims with great care. Companies make horrible mistakes by notifying their customers too late. 
2. Create a security policy: In most cases of a data breach, proper security controls were clearly not placed. A solid security policy will cover handling and disposing sensitive data. You can minimize the risk of data being leaked.  
3. Implement Security Awareness Training: Creating a human firewall is essential in ensuring your organization knows how to spot a potential scam from occurring.