Expert Advice: How to Up Your Cyber Security What you need to know to fend off a hack attack

The average cost to a U.S. business of a lost or stolen record containing customer information is $201, according to the 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute for IBM. The most expensive incidents are due to malicious attacks, not to human error or process failure. That's a problem for your business.

Mega-retailer Target may have had to pay cash to counter its late-2013 data hack, which reportedly affected up to 110 million customers, but it was lucky. Similar breaches have resulted in the destruction of companies.

"If you get it wrong, your business can be erased," says Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer at Xceedium Inc. in Herndon, Va. Xceedium sells platforms used by government and major corporate customers to manage access privileges on information systems. Ammon urges startups, even those in their early stages, to pay extra attention to the security of data. We asked him to tell us more.