Estimate the breach cost tied to sensitive data that leaves your warehouse and lands in ungoverned spreadsheets and CSV files. Figures are sourced from IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025.
Sets the industry breach cost benchmark shown below. Does not affect the per-record exposure math.
Average cost per compromised record by data type, per IBM 2025.
Finance, revenue ops, data, and BI users who regularly export or download from the warehouse.
Percentage of that group doing at least one export or download in a typical month.
Rows containing PII, financial detail, or other regulated data in a typical export.
Email attachments, laptop saves, shared drives, USB drives. Shown as an attack-surface metric, not multiplied into the dollar figure.
Estimated exposure
Employees exporting monthly
13
Sensitive records exposed per year
75,000
Ungoverned copies created per year
450
Industry benchmark: the average total cost of a breach in the selected industry is $4.44M. Spreadsheet sprawl exposure is a contributing slice of this figure, not additive to it.
Environment effect: breaches involving data scattered across multiple environments average $5.05M, versus $4.01M when data stays in one governed environment. Ungoverned spreadsheet copies are a direct driver of the former.
Methodology: exposure is calculated as annual sensitive records exposed through spreadsheet exports, multiplied by IBM's average cost per compromised record for the selected data type. This is a directional planning estimate built from published industry averages, not a certified actuarial or legal risk assessment. Source: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, based on 600 organizations breached between March 2024 and February 2025. Figures should be paired with an organization's own data inventory for a precise estimate.
