Like a lot of organizations, when the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) comes out, we scour it for data and other information relevant to our business. Regular readers of our blog know we talk a lot about how secure, managed file transfer can play an important role in data security and management strategies for organizations that work with sensitive, regulated data. And regular readers of our blog know that virtually every organization works with sensitive, regulated data.
Misdeliveries are a Major Risk
For the 2022 Verizon DBIR, 23,896 security incidents were investigated and 5,212 of those were confirmed as resulting in a data breach. One word that figures prominently in the report among those 5,212 data breaches is “misdelivery.” That’s how they describe an error that results in protected information ending up in the wrong hands, and misdelivery played a role in 715 incidents, 708 of which resulted in a breach. In other words, 13.5% of all data breaches involved someone making a mistake and sending sensitive information to the wrong place.
Elsewhere in the report you find that the incident rate is higher in certain industries. In healthcare, for example, data is said to be misdelivered at a rate 2.5 times greater than average, while in financial services the number is 16%. Overall, no matter the industry, the most common types of data compromised by breaches involving misdelivery were personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and financial data.
MFT is a Simple Remedy
As both a consumer and someone who runs a secure managed file transfer software company, I find those figures frustrating. The frustration comes from knowing that my personal, financial, and medical data is at risk from the likelihood of someone making a silly error somewhere where I do business. It also frustrates me because my company makes an easy-to-use, award-winning data security and management tool that can help minimize that risk. Better still, Coviant Software’s Diplomat MFT doesn’t cost a lot, so there’s no excuse.
Another excellent data breach research report, IBM’s annual Ponemon Institute Cost of a Data Breach Report, found that the average cost of a data breach was $4.24 million in 2021. Those costs include factors like fines and penalties, legal costs, technical remediation, lost business and opportunity loss, and the increased costs associated with post-breach marketing and credit monitoring programs.
Coviant Software’s Diplomat MFT costs $6999 per year for our Enterprise Edition (smaller organizations with more modest file transfer needs pay either $999 or $1999 per year). That’s a small price to pay to dramatically reduce the chance of someone having a bad day at work and making a simple error that results in important files getting sent to the wrong recipient; or of relying on someone in your IT department to cobble together a few scripts without taking into consideration everything that is involved in issues like privacy compliance and secure automation; or of making an assumption that data was properly encrypted and archived, only to find that you have no documentation when the auditor launches an investigation.
Avoid Common Errors
These are the kinds of things that happen on a regular basis. They are avoidable errors that cost your organization dearly in terms of time, money, and reputation. And when you consider that, according to the latest DBIR, you have a 13% chance of suffering a misdelivery data breach, you have an obligation as an organization to take the steps necessary to mitigate that risk. And when you choose Diplomat MFT, that step is easy to use and easy to justify. In fact, we take a no-code approach to workflow creation so that your non-technical staff can quickly establish secure, automated processes for securely sending and receiving your most sensitive files. And every step is automatically documented to ensure compliance.
If you have any questions about our products, we’d love to answer them and to give you a no-obligation demonstration of how Diplomat MFT works. If you want to try it yourself for free, you can download a trial version of our software. It’s a small step that can save your organization a huge headache.
