According to new report IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 rose to $4.45M per incident, up 2.3% from 2022 ($4.35M) and 15.3% from 2020 ($3.86M). The most frequently leaked type of data was customer and employee personal information (52% of all incidents).

The report also indicated that one in three companies discovered the data breach themselves, while the rest were reported by third parties or attackers. Leak detection and assessment costs rose 9.7% to $1.58 million, while the cost of losing business decreased 8.5% to $1.30 million. In the US, the average cost of a data breach was the highest in the world at $9.48 million.

The report also highlights that 82% of the leaks involved data stored in public, private, or combined clouds. In 39% of cases, leaks affected multiple cloud environments and resulted in above-average fines of $4.75 million.

IBM provided several recommendations for data loss prevention leaders, including ensuring security at all stages of development, monitoring hybrid cloud environments, considering the use of AI and automation, and implementing an incident response system.

Companies actively using AI and security automation, on average, lost $1.76 million less on data breaches and reduced the time to identify and locate a breach by 108 days.

The report was produced in partnership with the Ponemon Institute and is based on responses from 553 organizations across 16 countries and 17 industries, each of which experienced data breaches between March 2022 and March 2023.