2014 saw its fair share of data breaches, hacks, and fraudulence. The industry worst hit, by far, this year was the retail industry. Target was just the beginning for the retail industry network intrusions.

In 2014, over the 5 major industries (Financial, healthcare, educational, Government/military, and business/retail) there were 761 data breaches with an astounding 83 million + records exposed. This is pretty significant compared to the numbers from 2013 which saw 537 breaches and about 55 million in exposed records (IDtheftcenter.org, 2014).

Since we know retail took the biggest hit, let’s look at how lopsided the statistics really are. Of all the breaches and compromised records from 2014 retail accounted for 32% of the data breaches and 79% of the records compromised. The only industry to have more data breaches was healthcare, which accounted for 42% of all breaches in 2014 (IDtheftcenter.org, 2014).

The cost per record has also seen an increase this year, for the third time in a row. Last year, each exposed record cost an average of $188, this year that value sits at $201 per record (Ponemon, 2014). The overall average cost of a data breach has also increased over the last year. The costs increased from $5.4 million in 2013 to $5.9 million in 2014. But as we know from Target, Michael’s and others, it’s not the cost of the breach itself that is the worst, it’s the profits lost after the breach.

As a matter of fact, losing customers is starting to become scarier than the breaches themselves. The rise in overall costs has a direct relationship to customer turnover. Companies have to spend more money to help preserve their reputation and brand.   The average rate of customer turnover has increased by 15% in the last year alone (Ponemon, 2014).

Organizations have taken the proper steps to help mitigate their losses dealing directly with the breach, but are now having to protect and preserve their customer bases. Brand protection is the new theme in data security.