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Study: IT leaders count the cost of breaches, data loss and downtime

Among costly incidents, IT leaders named breaches to be the most damaging from a financial perspective, accounting for a loss of more than $860,000 on average annually at organizations.

On Tuesday, data management and protection corporation EMC released the findings of its global IT Trust Curve survey, which compiled responses from 3,200 IT leaders and business decision makers in the U.S., U.K., Canada and numerous other countries, including those in Europe and Asia.

According to the report, security breaches cost organizations several hundred thousand dollars more on average than other commonly occurring IT incidents.

While respondents reported an average financial loss of $860,273 due to breaches, incidents such as data loss and downtime also impacted organizations heavily – costing businesses $585,892 and $497,037, respectively, over the course of a year.

The study noted that the top factors preventing organizations from “achieving greater success in relation to data protection, security and availability,” were budget, resource and/or workload constraints and issues in planning and anticipation.

Another major contributing factor was leaders' lack of trust in technology or IT solutions, the study found.

In the past year, 61 percent of participants' companies experienced at least one security incident categorized as a security breach, data loss event or unplanned downtime.

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