According to a study released Tuesday by Telus and the Rotman School of Management, annual breach costs for Canadian businesses have almost doubled in the last year from $423,469 to $839,149 per organization. A key contributor to this growth is the number of employees, dismissed from their jobs, who take valuable data with them.

“As job losses mount, the threat to the environment rises,” says Walid Hejazi, a professor of business economics at the Rotman School and one of the co-authors of the report, Rotman — Telus: Joint Study on Canadian IT Security Practices. The study polled about 50 participants in nine focus groups across Canada, focusing on organizations with 100 or more employees.

This is the second annual study for Rotman and Telus. The organizations undertook the study to provide Canadian businesses with relevant domestic data. Too often, says Hejazi, Canadian businesses get their IT security information from U.S. sources. But Canada has a very different threat landscape from the U.S. — government, health care, financial systems and privacy regulation are all handled very differently up here.

“As a business professor at the Rotman School, (I say) we need to develop clarity. It’s very, very important that information be allowed to flow.”

Despite the rise in challenges to security due to the economic downturn, preparedness on the part of Canadian businesses has not risen commensurately, says Hejazi.