A new study looks at just how much a data breach can cost a commercial or enterprise business

With what feels like new, major data breaches constantly, how much could that cost your company?

Data breaches have obviously been around since there was such a thing as data, but it feels like in recent years companies have had more issues keeping their data secure. From Facebook to Google, it seems there no company too big or too secure to be completely free of data breaches.

Most of the time our first thoughts go towards our own data and what we need to do to make sure we're safe (and rightfully so), but something that isn't discussed as much is the cost to the business when a data breach occurs. 

Obviously, there can be a lot of factors, but one thing is for sure, it isn't cheap. According to a study from the Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, the average data breach worldwide costs a company $3.86 million. That's over a 6% increase from 2017. In the US alone, the average cost reaches almost $8 million.

For a bit more of a breakdown, Egnyte, a company that helps with secure content sharing and collaborations, offers some details when it comes to actual files. You can check it out below (this study uses data both from Egnyte and the Ponemon Institute).

There's some interesting information here, but the main takeaway is that the average cost of a breach per file is $148 with an average of 873,000 files per terabyte.

According to its data, a commercial business with less than 500 employees has over 533 GB of data that is at risk. This would mean a breach would cost as much as $67,000. Bump that up to an enterprise business that contains an average of 7448 GB of data, that expensive shoots up to over $940,000.

With data playing such an important role in businesses and that seemingly continuing in 2019, data breaches will continue to be an issue for businesses and end users alike, the real question is - how expensive will these things be for everyone involved?