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Gemalto recently published its latest Breach Level Index, an activity the company inherited from SafeNet, and that is conducted twice a year. In the latest edition, covering the first half of 2018, the company establishes that 3.5 billion data records have being compromised worldwide in H1/ 2018. These data breaches continue to grow faster as the number of records compromised more than doubled over the previous year’s figures.

According to Gemalto research, human errors and poor security practices continue to be a major source of data breaches. Unsurprisingly, and in line with its business positioning, Gemalto concludes that access management, including multi-factor authentication brings significant improvements in terms of global security.

Interestingly, there is no direct relation between the amount spent on data security and its efficiency in terms of protection against data breaches: Gartner anticipates that end-user spending for the information security market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.5% from 2017 through 2022 to reach US$ 170 billion (EUR 148 billion) in constant currency.

Also, spending more is unlikely to impact the gravity of data breaches, as demonstrated by Cybersecurity Ventures, a researcher and publisher covering the global cyber economy, which forecasts that cybercrime will cost the world in excess of US$ 6 trillion (EUR 5.2 trillion) annually by 2021.

In addition, new regulations such as GDPR in the European Union, and its equivalents in Australia and in the US, make it mandatory for companies that fall victims of data breaches to report the breach to all potentially impacted third parties within a very short lead time. These new regulations lead to making systems that hold personal information more secure but lead to increasing expenses and fast-growing needs for cybersecurity experts.

Even if the growth of security expenses remains slower than the growth of damages due to lack of security, the situation will lead to a shortage of skilled labor to deal with these issues. The unemployment rate for cybersecurity professionals is already zero percent. Palo Alto Networks predict that, by 2019, the demand for cybersecurity professionals will increase to approximately 6 million globally. What is even more interesting is that the shortage of trained professionals is projected to be 25%, or 1.5 million jobs unfilled.