Data breaches impact customer loyalty

Data breaches have a significant impact on whether a customer will interact with an organisation again, according to new research from SafeNet, a data protection solutions company. The global research, which surveyed over 4,500 people across five countries - US, UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia - found that nearly 65 per cent of respondents would never, or were very unlikely to, do business again with a company that had experienced a data breach where financial data (credit card information, bank account number, or login details) was stolen.

According to SafeNet, 237 security breaches took place between April and June this year that compromised more than 175 million customer records of personal and financial information worldwide. For the first half of 2014, more than 375 million customer records were stolen or lost as a result of 559 breaches worldwide. The retail industry had more data records compromised than any other industry during the second quarter, with more than 145 million records stolen or lost. Less than one percent of the breaches during the second quarter were secure breaches where strong encryption solutions protected the data from being used.