This article by Skip Newberry, President of the Technology Association of Oregon, was originally published in the Portland Business Journal.
As more and more business processes move online, cyberattacks and data breaches continue to grow in severity and frequency, while costing companies an average of $3.62 million per data breach, according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study. Cybersecurity experts predict that this trend will only increase. The Identity Theft Resource Center reported that data breaches in the U.S. increased 40 percent in 2016, hitting an all-time high.
And, if that wasn’t bad enough, today’s increasingly complex and rapidly changing privacy regulations are putting many companies at risk for non-compliance with federal, state, and even international data breach notification laws.
Recently, I talked with Mahmood Sher-Jan, CEO at RADAR, Inc., about the genesis of his company and about data privacy and security. RADAR, based in Portland, has developed an incident response management platform to automate incident risk assessment and management of privacy and security incidents.
The RADAR Team
“In late 2009 and the beginning of 2010, I began to see an industry challenge that wasn’t being addressed,” Sher-Jan said. “Back then, cyberattacks on personally identifiable information and protected health information were just starting to get attention, but there wasn’t a software solution to help companies manage their privacy incident and data breach response. In the healthcare and finance industries, the incident management process was archaic and manual. Conventional wisdom at the time was ‘no two incidents are alike,’ so we need a manual approach using case-by-case analysis. However, I saw an opportunity to leverage proven analytical risk modeling to come up with an alternative approach.”