2019 was a bad year for data security. By virtually every metric, it was the worst ever. According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach reached $3.92 million, the highest amount on record. At the same time, the number of data breaches will reach an all-time high this year. The number of data breaches increased by 54% in the first half of 2019, with nearly 4,000 publicly disclosed breaches during that time. In total, more than 4.1 billion records have been exposed this year.
Increasingly, consumers and regulatory bodies are holding companies accountable for data breaches.
