Examining the Outcomes and Organizational Responses of IT Security Breaches

As transactions and organizational infrastructures become increasingly digitized, this has led to the collection and storage of large volumes of data, information, and records. Digitization provides essential benefits to organizations such as enhanced record keeping and increases in efficiency; however, it also increases the likelihood of IT security breach events. This mixed method research study seeks to understand the relationship among organizational response tactics to IT security breach events and the organizational losses from IT security breach events.This study finds that both proactive and reactive governance, relationship management, and security strategic management tactics can be helpful in reducing losses after an IT security breach event for organizations. However, the findings indicate that organizations should exercise extreme caution in implementing reactive communication management, morale management, and IT resource management tactics so as not to further exacerbate organizational losses from an IT security breach event.