The research found that finance and healthcare were the costliest industries for data losses, with £8.4m and £4.6m lost per breach respectively.

IBM Security estimated that each individual data record breached cost £128, with many breaches seeing large numbers of data records affected.

The report adds that the two major causes of data breaches are phishing ( 16%) and stolen credentials ( 15%), with breaches caused by those two types of attacks also being the costliest to an organisation.

Technical issues such as system errors were the least common and least costly, according to the research.

Kevin Pratt, editor at Forbes Advisor UK, said: “As businesses continue to store more sensitive data, it’s inevitable that once a breach happens, the cost of a breach increases as well.

“What’s important is to prevent the breaches through effective information security measures, and these measures don’t always need to be overly technical.”