How safe is your data? Breaches anyone?

If yesterday’s post on the risk of you dying in the next 5 years wasn’t scary enough, here’s a quick round-up of the scary amount of data breaches in the news. How safe is your customer data? How do you know?

A great source for news on this topic is always Data IQ and sure enough they are covering the 183% increase in data breaches reported by FS firms:

Bear in mind that is just the level of breaches identified and reported to the ICO.

Meanwhile, the Guardian is covering the worrying breach of access to US government employee data, potentially originating from China. Cyberterrorism is just one reason for breaches but a scarily well resourced one:

Perhaps even more worrying than the coverage of that incident is the fact that data breaches now happen often enough in the US to justify a dedicated news site. If any CDOs want scare themselves into the weekend, check out this site:

All to often ‘in house’ data management or data security teams are amongst the least “sexy” roles with companies and senior stakeholders can avoid meetings or papers on this topic. But given the amount of data breaches now happening, the commercial dependence of most modern businesses on their data & the true cost of suffering such a breach – it’s time to take them very seriously.

Sleep well.