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We have stressed the importance of PCI Compliance before. It is one of the most important things that you can do and it is necessary to complete to stay in business. Here in the United States studies have shown that every data breach has one thing in common, the breached party was not in PCI Compliance when the breach happened. But this is not just an American phenomenon. It is a worldwide phenomenon and today we will examine Australia’s record and hope that we can all learn something from it.
The Australia Bureau of Statistics examined the IT landscape of its county’s businesses for 2017 and 2018. One of the things examined was whether the company had been a victim of some sort of data breach. 832,000 businesses were surveyed and the results were a bit surprising.
Some Good News
First the good news and that is about 72% surveyed had not suffered a data breach. These companies are either taking their IT and cyber security seriously or they have been extremely lucky. That number though also leaves a lot of businesses left over.
The Rest
About 18% said they had no idea whether they had been breached or not. The rest had been the victim of a breach. With about 10% of all businesses that means around 83,000 businesses in Australia had suffered some form of data breach or security incident. In a country of 26 million people that is a lot of businesses.
Now, not all of these was a loss of data. Some wound up being a corruption of hardware or software and some was a defacement of a website. But all involved an unauthorized third party actor accessing their system. Roughly 8% resulted in a loss of income and roughly one third said it resulted in a loss of productivity.
In Australia at least the good news is that cyber security is becoming more important. In the 2015-2016 report 47% of businesses said that cyber security was at least somewhat important and that was up to 54% in this current report and 92% of all businesses with more than 200 employees answered in the affirmative. That is a number that is still too low but at least it is trending in the right direction.
You don’t need to be an IT pro to perform the most basic cyber security tasks and keep your systems secure. Simply keeping your computers and their software up to date and keeping your website up to date and secure with a strong password goes a long way towards maintaining PCI Compliance. You don’t need to be a computer geek to do this, anyone can and by doing it you can avoid a costly data breach or intrusion that could hit your business hard.
PCI Compliance is expected in Australia just like it is here in the US. It is somewhat heartening to know that we are not the only country that has its issues with cyber security and data breaches but the number of companies that suffer data breaches should be 0. Every data breach is preventable, so take your cyber security seriously and meet and maintain PCI Compliance. If you do, you will keep your business safe and keep your customers happy.
