Data security is essential for any business that handles customer data on a regular basis. Whether you run a hospital or oversee an e-commerce company, it’s crucial to ensure that your user information always remains safe and secure.
But how do you achieve optimal data security, especially during a digital era when breaches and online threats seem inevitable? In this article, we’ll discuss why data management is the key to data security and what steps you can take today to make the best most-informed decisions and goals for your business’s data moving forward.
What is data security?
Before we delve into the benefits of data management, let’s first outline what data security is and why it matters for enterprise businesses.
In its simplest form, data security refers to the process of protecting valuable data, and safeguarding it against illegitimate access or corruption. For businesses, this means keeping their customers’ key information safe and instilling the proper policies and procedures to protect this data.
Why does this matter for businesses? Privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), dictate that businesses must take caution with the collection, use and storage of customer data. Companies that violate the terms of the GDPR or varying other security regulations can acquire large fines and lose the confidence of their customers over time. A mere security breach could be the only thing standing between your data and a hacker wiping out the public’s trust in your business. For those who operate in the healthcare industry, remaining HIPAA compliant is important for the handling and storage of sensitive patient data as well.
Fortunately, data quality helps businesses to significantly reduce the risk of security issues and helps them remain compliant with the latest data regulations.
Data management & governance: the prerequisite for data security
Reliable data and data security go together. When your customers entrust you with personal and private information, they expect you to protect this data from entering the wrong hands. As businesses look to increase the protection of their clients’ data, they need to factor data governance and management into the equation first.
What is data governance? In a nutshell, data governance refers to the processes surrounding how your business’s data is managed and used. This includes how your data is:
- Used
- Stored
- Accessed
- Secured
What does this have to do with data security? Data governance will play a key role in helping you to confidently leverage your data with security measures in mind. Having data fit for a purpose helps to mitigate and manage compliance risks while formalizing your data quality activities. When you have a plan for how to organize and leverage your data, it makes it simpler to ensure it's always handled in the proper way.
Data management ensures data security through its lifecycle
How often does your own personal information change? If you’re like most people, the answer probably teeters between periodically to frequently—which is to be expected given that addresses, phone numbers, and other valuable data assets are everchanging. Each year, countless users move, change phone numbers, and switch their contact data.
This means that it’s easy to accidentally contact users with the wrong information when the proper data management practices are not instilled into your business’s operational procedures. Sending crucial messages with private information to the wrong contact data means compromising the security of your client's data. Proper data management, such as data cleansing, helps improve the accuracy of your users’ information over time by removing incomplete or incorrect data from your database. Creating a single customer view is also a great way to consolidate customer information and ensure that snippets of customer data are more cohesive under one holistic view.
Enhancing your data management strategy
Data is rarely static. This means that at any given moment, your database can possess outdated information that doesn’t reflect the true contact data of your existent clientele. Fortunately, the right data management software and strategies can help build confidence in your data so that you can more accurately reach your intended audience while successfully minimizing security risks.
