In Part I, I left you with a teaser about how a home moving dilemma is the state of the enterprise today for cloud migration. Let’s now dig into the challenges that CIOs and CSOs are facing today in their journey to the Hybrid Cloud.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
The 2025 Cost of Data Breach Report is the first major study to survey a large sampling of data breach victims about their AI access controls, so the overall security picture in this area is only just starting to come into focus. Thus far it seems fair to say that control and security are not at all keeping pace with the feverish pace of deployment of AI tools.
The global average cost of data breach is now $4.35 million, a climb of 13% since 2020. Much of that are expenses realized more than a year after the attack, and most organizations (60%) are passing these added costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
IBM's annual Cost of Data Breach report, created in conjunction with Ponemon Institute, shows no relief in sight for victims of breaches with a 10% jump in the global average cost on the year. The highest average cost per incident, $5.17 million, was incurred when the breached data was stored in public clouds.
Average cost of data breach has once again hit a new record to $4.45 million, up 15.3% just from 2020. Yet only 51% of organizations that have suffered a breach plan to increase security spending.
Cost of a data breach is becoming more serious every year. Latest IBM-Ponemon study reports an average figure of $3.92 million which is 12% higher than it was just five years ago.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) suffered a sophisticated cyber attack coinciding with the Hague NATO summit attended by U.S. President Donald J. Trump, who pushed for increased defense spending among member countries.
The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined outsourcing firm Capita £14 million ($18.8M) for its alleged failure to prevent a data breach that compromised the personal information of millions of people.
The 2021 OT/ICS Cybersecurity Report confirms that threats to industrial operations are rising both in number and severity and while monitoring is up, but 48% say that they cannot be sure that they have not been breached.
The 2022 ICS Cybersecurity Report sees the majority of organizations recognizing ICS threats as being very serious; 22% ranked them as "critical" and 41% ranked them as "high" priority, representing a slow but steady increase over the past several years.










