While most companies see cyber security as a major concern, they nevertheless underestimate how much a security breach can cost, according to a new survey from Aveksa Inc.

When survey respondents were asked how much they thought IT security breaches cost companies per compromised record. 42 percent of respondents stated they thought the cost was less than $200 per affected record with many believing it was less than $100 per record. According a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, the cost of IT security breaches is $214 per compromised record. For example, it is estimated that it cost Sony $171 million to clean up the recent Playstation security breach.

Survey respondents, consisting of IT executives from large, global companies across many different vertical industries, were asked what their primary concerns were in regards to moving sensitive applications and data to external cloud-based providers. According to the results of the survey, 49 percent of respondents stated that unauthorized application access was a major concern in this area.

Respondents were also asked how important it was to obtain fine-grained, entitlement-level visibility and control of who has access to critical IT assets in the data center (such as operating systems, hypervisors, databases, middleware, web servers and systems management applications). 98% of the respondents stated that stringent access control for data center assets was either very important or critically important.