90% of large organisations suffered data breaches in 2014

The infographic below demonstrates that businesses large and small are vulnerable to security breaches, and the cost is increasing substantially.

There are inevitably instances where breaches are difficult to prevent. Malicious outsiders will always try to stay ahead of the protection available. However, there's no excuse for failing to take what steps are available to protect personal data. It's worth noting the importance of staff training - even those companies who have security policies in place are likely to suffer a breach if their employees don't fully understand their policies. And though the full report does show some encouraging stats around staff training, over 50% of serious breaches were caused by inadvertent staff error.

It's also interesting to see how new technology is impacting the stats, including devices, cloud computing and social networking.