The Growing Importance Of Data Privacy & Its Value To Businesses

Data privacy is a bigger issue now than ever before for both companies and consumers, as a hacker attack occurs once every 39 seconds. A lot of private information is stored online and in the company’s databases, so a data breach can lead to serious issues for consumers and businesses alike.

Data is a vital asset for any business, so the privacy of data needs to be taken seriously. If you want to learn about it in a broader sense, Prolifics explains it in great detail.

But for now, let’s focus on the value and the growing importance that data has for your business.

Why Is Data Privacy So Important For Your Business?

Without proper protocols in place, your business probably wouldn’t be able to survive for long. There are many reasons why data privacy should be a concern for all businesses and why its importance is so great. However, the four reasons listed below stand above the rest.

1. Preventing Data Breaches

With the threat of data breaches rising every day, organizations need to have strong security safeguards in place. The main goal is to protect customers’ personal data. As soon as you have those safeguards, the chances of security incidents that lead to data breaches will decrease significantly.

2. Complying With Regulations

Organizations that don’t have a way to ensure privacy protections aren’t just irresponsible, they also break the law. There are requirements that state organizations that fail to comply with laws and regulations regarding data privacy may face monetary fines as high as tens of millions of dollars. Furthermore, non-compliance with these laws can result in up to 20-year penalties.

3. Supporting Ethics

Most organizations follow an established code of ethics, and even if they don’t, they have to follow certain ethical practices if they want their business to succeed. One of these ethical policies usually states that all confidential information a customer has shared with the company needs to be handled responsibly. This means that this information can only be used for business purposes and must never be used in a way that might harm the customer.

4. Maintaining Customer Loyalty

Customers want to know their personal information is safe and that companies do everything to keep their data private. A large number of customers will stop doing business with a company in the case of a significant personal data leak and they will simply switch to a competitor.

How To Solve Challenges Created By Data Privacy Regulations

Data privacy regulations come with some challenges. While they can sometimes be hard to deal with, all you need to do is learn how to approach this issue.

Implementing Data Privacy

Data privacy touches on multiple parts of every business. Unfortunately, most companies tack data privacy to their IT security plan and think that’s enough, but it certainly isn’t. This shows that you only see data privacy as an afterthought and don’t take it seriously enough.

To implement data privacy the right way, it needs to be at the center of your data strategy and all staff members need to be trained in it.

Find A Way To Manage Access Control

A large number of data privacy breaches are caused by access control that wasn’t properly managed within a company. Keep in mind that technology isn’t the only thing you need to worry about, people and processes also matter.

Unfortunately, human employees can pose a threat to data privacy, especially within an organization that has a lot of employees, as this makes it harder to manage user access. To solve this issue, you need to have strong data governance processes as well as good data architecture.

Don’t Store More Data Than Necessary

When big data first appeared, there was a lot of hype surrounding it and many organizations believed that because they can store a lot of data, they should collect as much data as possible. However, when you think about the implications this could have, you’ll realize why this is a bad idea.

Don’t keep data just for the sake of keeping it because this broadens the surfaces hackers can target and steal data from. Instead, make a good balance between the value of collecting and storing large quantities of data on one hand and meeting compliance and security regulations on the other.

Learn To Differentiate Between Types Of Data

Not all data is created equal and some types of it need to have better security than others. You need to discover and classify all data so you can be sure where it’s located and how sensitive it is. This will allow you to treat all data uniquely.

Manage Data On All Devices

There are a lot of factors you need to consider that can make data privacy harder to control. One of those things is multiple types of devices, especially in organizations where employees are allowed to bring their own devices to work.

If you have this kind of policy, either re-think it or make sure that all devices employees use comply with data privacy regulations.

Wrap-Up

Data privacy has been an ongoing issue for years, and it will continue to cause problems for organizations that don’t take it seriously enough. However, if you carefully consider everything you just read, you can ensure that your organization is safe, trustworthy, and follows all regulations.

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