2019 was a bad year for data security. By virtually every metric, it was the worst ever. According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach reached $3.92 million, the highest amount on record. At the same time, the number of data breaches will reach an all-time high this year. The number of data breaches increased by 54% in the first half of 2019, with nearly 4,000 publicly disclosed breaches during that time. In total, more than 4.1 billion records have been exposed this year.