The major data breaches of the past year have hit businesses hard. Equifax saw its share price drop by 13 percent within a day of revealing its breach, and estimates it will end up spending $275 million in clean-up costs this year. Yahoo suffered a $350 million drop in its sale price to Verizon after reporting that data breaches had affected one billion accounts – a number which was later revised to all three billion.  

The impact these incidents have had on the bottom line should be enough to grab the attention of executives and directors in every industry, and motivate them to rethink their security strategy. However, more than a third of senior IT and marketing professionals believe that brand protection is still not taken seriously by senior level executives, according to a 2017 Ponemon survey.  

Equifax and Yahoo are not alone. In the same study, Ponemon examined 113 publicly traded companies, and found that they lost an average share value of five per cent on the day that a data breach was disclosed. IT professionals can help business decision makers to understand the dimension of the cybersecurity challenge, and how to formulate appropriate solutions, by asking six straightforward questions.