According to IBM's 2021 report, the average data breach cost more than $4 million worldwide in 2021. In the United States, that number rises to $8 million. That's an over 10% increase over the previous year. So, data breaches are a significant business risk. But costs aren't the only reason to tighten your security. Breaches hurt your clients and your company's reputation. You've seen data breaches in the news. Every day brings news of a fresh attack.

Modern business runs on data. Even companies that produce and sell physical products create, store, and use data. They need it to find customers, maintain relationships, sell products, and monitor costs and profits. Therefore, data is valuable. It's worth protecting, especially when you consider how often we hear about bad actors stealing it. But you can't protect something you don't know you have. You need a complete picture of what data your business is producing, storing, and using.

Software-driven organizations that process sensitive data are increasingly exposed to risks of data breaches. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Reports reminds us that the average cost of a data breach rose from $3.86M to $4.24M (2021) and that the chance for an organization to experience a data breach within two years is 29.6% (2019).

Data breaches happen to companies across all industries, even within highly secure organizations. In fact, 45 percent of companies experienced a data breach in 2021, a figure that’s bound to increase this year. While you can’t always prevent a data breach, there are steps that you can take to mitigate the damage. It’s also possible to fortify your defenses so your organization is ready if and when the next attack occurs.

Working with data is something that requires a lot of care and precision, yet it often remains an under-scrutinized aspect of DevSecOps. This is because it requires focusing on many moving parts. You need to know exactly when data events occur, what parties are involved, and how they send and store data. In any process with more than minimal complexity, this is a huge web of events. Data flow mapping is the key to detangling that web.

Data breaches and hacks can cost companies millions. To protect sensitive data, you have to ensure that your entire system is compliant with data security standards and regulations. To properly evaluate your level of compliance, you need to conduct a data security audit. In this post, we’ll look at how to conduct a data security audit. You'll learn about the different types of audits, and the steps to take when conducting an audit.

Companies today are consuming and deploying more data than ever. At the same time, there's also a growing cybersecurity talent shortage, as well as an increasingly dangerous threat landscape. Unfortunately, this combination leaves companies at risk for costly breaches and vulnerabilities. For this reason, many traditional IT security engineers are upskilling and transitioning into data security to help close the cybersecurity gap and protect private data.

Hiring is hard. If you're a remote company like we are, you already have a head start. A larger pool of applicants, more practical benefits over a "fun office", etc. That doesn't mean that when the time comes to hire for a new role, you will immediately find the perfect candidate. When we were hiring for our recent frontend developer role, we were surprised how hard it ended up being. Not for lack of candidates, but instead for the right fit within our existing team.

As we explained in a previous blog post, we decided to pivot at the end of summer 2020. Pivoting our products has been a major change in our cross-functional team’s organization, and we used it as an opportunity to start our UI/UX and an engineering processes from scratch. One of the aspects of that change is the organizational changes it implied, driven by our desire to iterate fast with the first pioneer users of the product that were—and still are—helping us build it.

Usability testing is a method for evaluating your product to see how it performs in real contexts. It helps test user behavior, performance, and satisfaction, while consequently offering opportunities to improve the user experience within the product. Often, in a fast-paced company, user research ends up overlooked because it takes up time and resources. However, all the team's hard work will be wasted if you end up making something that nobody wants to use.