Data has become essential for businesses now that we live in a digital era. From personal information to proprietary business information, the data we store and share holds immense value. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and ensuring data privacy has become paramount. This is where the data visibility comes into play.
There are 2 ways of achieving data visibility and ensuring data privacy and security – one is a manual process and the other is automated. Regardless of the process you want to adopt to achieve it, you need to understand the benefits of data visibility and data mapping, so you can understand the importance and urgency of it.
1. Complete Overview means Complete Control
Sensitive data comes in many forms, so it’s important to know what data you’re dealing with in order to define what sensitive data is for your organization (personal information, financial records, health information, passwords, and more).
When you know what data your organization stores, where it is, and who has access to it, you can better prioritize the protective measures you have in place or add new ones. 72% of breaches still happen due to human error, so this overview will help reduce the risk.
2. Minimize Data Breaches and Data Misuse
Data visibility can help identify potential risks and vulnerabilities within your organization. With better visibility, you can proactively address these risks before they escalate into major issues. The time to react when a breach occurs is as low as a few minutes, so it is important to have preventive measures in place and a strong process of how data must be handled and the steps in case of a leak.
3. Avoid Privacy-Related Fines
Depending on the location your organization stores/manages data and where your clients and users are you will have to comply with different rules and regulations. This also can change based on the industry you are in.
Data visibility helps your organization ensure you are compliant with these regulations and can demonstrate it when and if necessary so you can avoid privacy-related fines.
4. Make more Informed Decisions
When data is visible within your organization, data privacy decisions are more accurately made – extra measures can be implemented when there will be an event where a big data flow is involved, or you can start the process to obtain a new certification when your organization expands, and so on.
It will help you and your organization not only properly react to unexpected events, but plan ahead and be prepared for different scenarios.
5. Increase Users’/Clients’ Trust
By demonstrating compliance and transparency in data handling to your clients, partners, and stakeholders, you increase your company’s brand trust and strengthen your position in the market.
In the past year, we’ve noticed this to be a major factor that determines the success of a company – data privacy stopped being an afterthought and started being a top-priority business decision.
Now that the benefits are clear and not to be ignored, we’ll talk briefly about how you can achieve data visibility. There are 3 key steps you have to follow:
- The first step is to find out what kind of data you store, where you store it, where you get it from, and who has access to it
- The second is to make sure you have processes and policies in place on how that data must be handled
- And third step is to constantly monitor and remediate data-related issues
To find out how Borneo can help provide an accurate, real-time data overview and avoid friction between departments, contact us here.
