How new technologies can help protect your analytics data and your bottom line
Technology trends and forces such as cloud, mobile and big data can represent big opportunities to bring analytic insight to the enterprise. They can also represent big risks if proper data security and governance controls are not in place. In 2015, one of the largest health benefits companies in the United States reported that its systems were the target of a massive data breach. This exposed millions of records containing sensitive consumer information such as social security numbers, medical IDs and income information. Various sources, including The Insurance Insider, suggest that this company's USD 100 million cyber-insurance policy would be depleted by the costs of notifying consumers of the breach and providing credit monitoring services—and that doesn’t consider other significant costs associated with a breach such as lost business, regulatory fines and lawsuits.
Data is now so important that it is has a value on the balance sheet. Cyber criminals know this. Without exception, every industry has been under attack and suffered data breaches – healthcare, government, banking, insurance, retail, telco. Once a company has been breached, hackers focus on other companies in that same industry to exploit similar vulnerabilities. In 2015 the average cost of a data breach was US$ 3.79M, causing long term damage to the brand, loss of faith and customer churn.
As you think about the impacts of this and other data security breaches occurring at organizations worldwide, consider this question: how exposed is your business to a similar type of breach? To answer this question, you must first ask, “Where does the data that feeds our analytics processes originate?”
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-Shantan
Hey Shantan,
ReplyDeleteYou raise a very interesting question and thought. There is so much focus today on building out vast, insightful, game changing analytics environments. It's exciting, but what about the risk? Take a very common example of personal consolidated information. t's great to have all my information managed by Google, but what happens when someone has access to that information. They know as much about me as I enjoy Google's services knowing. It's great that the world's largest companies can pull our social media data, financial data, etc, but in the wrong hands, that's etremely disruptive to an individual. So with all the focus on gathering, merging, analyzing every piece of data companies can gather, I hope that there is as much excitement about protecting it. In my experience, it's much more thought out after a problem already occurs.
Dylan