It’s not the kind of number you want to see increase. Unfortunately, 2014 saw a nearly 30 percent jump in data breach reports in the U.S. alone. Some companies have communicated effectively with their stakeholders, while others have failed miserably. Moreover, those failures have a significant cost in revenue, profitability, and reputation, in addition to the hard IT costs to beef up security.

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (www.idt911.com), in the United States in 2014...