India's average total cost of a data breach reached an all-time high at ₹17.6 crore in fiscal 2022, a 6.6% increase from last year's ₹16.5 crore and a climb of 25% from the ₹14 crore seen in 2020, IBM said on Wednesday.
The country’s average per record cost of a data breach in 2022 was ₹6,100, a 3.3% increase from ₹5,900 in 2021 and a 10.4% rise from ₹5,522 in 2020, IBM said from findings for India from its Data Breach Report 2022, based on analysis of real-world data breaches experienced by 550 enterprises between March 2021 and March 2022. On average, some 29,500 records were breached in the country by March 2022.
The industrial sector encountered average records breach worth ₹9,024; for the services sector, it was ₹7,085 while the technology sector reported ₹6,900. In the industrial sector, chemical processing, engineering, and manufacturing companies were the highest affected, according to the report.
The average mean time to identify a breach decreased from 239 to 221 days and the average mean time to contain a data breach rose only marginally from 81 to 82 days. The report also showed that organisations with less than 50% remote work adoption took 212 days as the average mean time to identify a data breach and 75 days as the average mean time to contain a data breach. However, organisations with more than 50% remote work adoption took 266 days and 91 days, respectively.
According to the report, organisations that were in the mature stages of adopting zero-trust deployment witnessed ₹15.1 crore as the total cost of a data breach compared with organisations that had not started such deployment and experienced ₹24.6 crore as costs.
“Today, we have reached a point where cyberattacks are evolving into market stressors, hurting the economy,” Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, Technology, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India and South Asia, told reporters. “Some 60% of global businesses have raised their prices as a result of the data breach, contributing to inflation, and inadvertently passing the cost on to customers. Hackers are exploiting these circumstances to force organisations to pay ransoms.’‘
