Ponemon Study: 2007 Cost of a Data Breach: White Paper

This Ponemon Institute, LLC benchmark survey explains the actual costs incurred by 35 U.S. organizations that lost confidential information and had a regulatory requirement to publicly notify affected individuals. The survey reveals:

Trust may be intangible and hard to quantify, but the result of breaking that trust is clear as the cost of lost business grew more than 30 percent since 2006.
Given both the rise in incidents where third parties are responsible and the widening cost disparity between in-house and third-party breaches, organizations should closely evaluate the enterprise data protection policies and systems used with and by third-party outsourcers or consultants.
Organizations that have built their brand on trust have more to lose from a data breach - demonstrated by the 21 percent higher costs for financial services compared to an average breach.
Encryption and data loss prevention solutions top the list of most-frequently named post-breach technology measures being deployed to help avert a future data breach.