Published on February 11th, 2019 | by Sunit Nandi

The Importance of Data Protection

Data protection is the process where you safeguard and protect your personal information from corruption, compromise or loss and ensures that you remain in control of it. Any information that business stores digitally should be properly protected.

Data protection is not just a legal requirement, it is crucial. Every business should prioritize in protecting their customer’s data. The common data that business usually stores include;

Name
Address
Telephone numbers
Emails
Health information
Bank and credit card detail etc.

This kind of data contains sensitive information because some contain confidential information of staff or their next of kin and so any business should ensure that they protect these data by all means. With the current rate of hacks and breaches happening like the recent Facebook hack that happened in 2018, companies need to protect their data effectively.

Many companies have experienced security breaches over the past years. Facebook as the major social media platform had a major shakedown quite recently thanks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook has introduced many changes to his APIs and thus, third-party companies using them had to adapt to the new tighten data sharing policy. Luckily, social media management platforms do not struggle, and they are able to continue with their business model which includes post scheduling and boosting. Thanks to them, there are some ideas or Facebook hacks that you can grab to you’re your company use Facebook for business without too much hassle, for example, you can edit boosted post easily.

The following are the crucial benefits of data protection.

1. Minimize financial loss

Data is considered as a very significant asset in an organization that needs to be safeguarded by all means. Loss of information in business can results in direct financial losses, such as lost sales, fines or monetary judgments.

Loss of data can also cause indirect losses when an investor’s confidence drop or when customers run to competitors. Stolen or altered data can result in financial effects when the company realizes it much later, and there’s little that can be done and hence magnified negative results.

2. Compliance with regulatory requirements

Businesses have to comply with the government’s regulations on electronic communications and stored data. Failure to compliance, the business can face dire consequences. In some countries, the executives are held criminally liable to comply with laws regarding storage and electronic communications.

These regulations determine what information to be stored, for how long, and under what conditions. Some of these regulations are designed to ensure the privacy of the information contained in the documents, databases, and files

Loss of critical information can be regarded as a violation of these regulations and may lead to payment of fine by the organization, or the managers can be subjected to legal action.

3. Maintaining a high level of productivity

Loss of essential data in an organization lowers the production level. This is because the staffs have to deal with customer issues without the help of computer databases. Loss of data can also lead to failure and application systems, and this may make it difficult for staffs to do their jobs.

A good business should have a good data protection strategy, one that doesn’t leave people waiting for too long for systems to be restored after a failure. This will make the staffs idle or work in a reduced capacity and will affect productivity.

4. Meeting customers’ expectations

Customers expect business to operate at all time. If a business experiences downtime, customers will move to competitors. Many businesses are forced to deploy extensive data protection schemes because of the inability to operate because of loss of a data.

Many businesses operate 24/7, or their computers do, e.g. the healthcare or financial services. Even when there are no humans around, the computers can operate efficiently like take and place orders, send the orders to the warehouse and take care of financial transactions. It’s for this reason that data protection strategies should take into consideration, the customer’s 24/7 expectations.

Tags: data protection, importance

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.