The caution comes by the way of Symantec's recent 2011 Cost of Data Breach Study, which has found that the average cost of a data breach reported by Australian organisations has maintained an upward trend for the third year in a row.

For Symantec Pacific director of specialist solutions, Sean Kopelke, the increase in the overall cost of data breaches is significant when it is broken down into the two levels of cost per record and the overall total cost to an organisation.

"Both of them went up, with cost per record going from $128 to $138 in 2011, and total cost going from $2 million in 2010 to $2.16 million in 2011," he said.

What Kopelke found interesting about this result was that the numbers in overseas regions such as the US. have "flatlined or gone down."

"In Australia, organisations still spend a lot of their expenses in post-breach, such as mitigating the error, reaching out to customers, and fixing up the problem overall," he said.