New Delhi, Jul 28 (IANS): An Indian organisation paid nearly Rs 16.5 crore on average as cost of data breach in 2021 to date, an increase of 17.85 per cent from last year in the remote work and learning times, a new IBM study showed on Wednesday.

Organisations with less than 50 per cent remote work adoption took 208 days as the average mean time to identify a data breach and 72 days as the average mean time to contain a data breach, according to the global '2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report' from IBM Security and US-based Ponemon Institute.

"The rapid shift to remote work witnessed a tremendous disruption of security programmes. India witnessed a record high in data breach during the pandemic leading to many organisations evaluating their security posture," said Prashant Bhatkal, Security Software Sales Leader, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia.

While Rs 5,900 was the cost per lost or stolen record in 2021, an increase of 6.85 per cent from 2020, 27,966 average records were breached between May 2020 and March 2021.

Organisations in India who are in the mature stages of adopting zero trust deployment witnessed over Rs 13.1 crore as the total cost of data breach as compared to organisations who are in the early stage of adoption and witnessed more than Rs 19.8 crore as the total cost of data breach, the findings showed.

The report was based on in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches of 1,00,000 records or less, experienced by over 500 organisations worldwide between May 2020 and March 2021.

Globally, data breaches now cost surveyed companies $4.24 million per incident on average -- the highest cost in the 17-year history of the report.

The findings suggest that security may have lagged behind these rapid IT changes, hindering organisations' ability to respond to data breaches.

"The rapid shift to remote operations during the pandemic appears to have led to more expensive data breaches. Breaches cost over $1 million more on average when remote work was indicated as a factor in the event, compared to those in this group without this factor ($4.96 vs. $3.89 million)," the report showed.

Bhatkal said that it is evident that with modernisation including the adoption of AI, security analytics, and applying a zero-trust approach, comes significantly decreased costs associated with data breaches.

"What's important is to learn and apply measures that saved organisations the most money when a breach occurred -- including applying zero trust, automation, hybrid cloud, and encryption," he noted.