“Sony on Monday said that it expects the cleanup cost from the data breaches it's suffered to cost at least $171 million,” reported by Mathew J. Schwartz of InformationWeek. 

$171 Million. Think about it. And there are the public relations clean-up costs as well. 

Loading up your network with multiple layers of security protection is of paramount importance if you want to do all you can to prevent a costly data breach. The money a company invests in securing their network is inexpensive compared to the cleanup costs and tarnished brand that could occur as a result of a breach.  Moving to a least privileges environment is a best practice to be highly considered.  As noted in Neil MacDonald’s recent blog post, “One of the top recommendations I made to increase your security “bang for the buck” in 2011 was to increase the percentage of users that run without administrative access.”

Removing administrator rights from the end users significantly reduces the number of malware introduced they will not have permissions to download or install unapproved software that could corrupt your endpoints.  After removing administrator rights, IT can utilize privilege management and application control software to enforce consistent policies for endpoint access to enterprise applications and desktop functions by controlling user rights for desktops and mobile users.   

Do you know the cost of a data breach?