The Ponemon 2016 Cost of Breach Study underscores the need for companies to take all necessary measures to combat the scourge of data breaches.

These include the establishment of a chief information security officer, appropriate data loss prevention controls, encryption where necessary and a robust cyber insurance program. The study found that "Incident response plans and teams in place, extensive use of encryption, employee training, Business Continuity Management involvement or extensive use of Data Loss Prevention reduced the cost of data breach."

The study confirms the resiliency of the hacking plague, and offers no hope that it will cease, or even diminish, in the foreseeable future. In the 11 years that Ponemon has conducted its study, the cost of a data breach has not fluctuated significantly. In 2016, the overall cost of a data breach was about $7 million, and the cost of each single lost record was $221, which are both slight increases from the previous year. The Ponemon Study only included "average" breaches; breaches in excess of 100,000 records were not used in the study. (The average number of breached records in incidents used in the Ponemon Study was 29,611.)