For the last few years, Ponemon Institute has studied the impact of data breaches. This year, the report, available for download here from IBM (http://www-03.ibm.com/security/data-breach/) notes some disturbing trends.

The per-record cost of a data breach, for example, is up 12 percent from 2014, from $145 U.S. to $154 U.S. The average total cost of a breach went up by 23 percent, to $3.79 million U.S. And not unexpectedly, the fall-out from breaches remains significant – lost of business, higher customer turnover, a hit to reputations – all added up to $1.57 million in costs per company – again an increase over 2014.

The U.S. had the highest cost per breach overall, while medical records led the pack in terms of the most costly types of breaches by data type.

We can’t seem to say this enough here at TCG: self-encrypting drives could go a long way in protecting much of this data. While data is stolen, lost or otherwise breached in a number of ways, much data goes missing from unencrypted laptops and other devices. Laptops or computers unattended in offices, left in vehicles, even stolen from data centers. Hardware-based encryption is available now in virtually every drive made for very little – if any – incremental cost. It is easily managed for many devices remotely. There is no impact on system performance, and users cannot turn it off. And, drives can be wiped in micro-seconds – ensuring that old drives don’t become the source of breached data and can be easily re-used.

Learn more bout SEDs here (http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/solutions/data_protection).