Data compliance refers to formal practices and standards to ensure the protection of sensitive data from theft, corruption, misuse, or loss. Compliant data management practices refer to regulations that your company must follow to organize, store and manage customers or business data.
Businesses from most industries must adhere to data management compliance rules. The purpose is to keep customers’ financial details and personally identifiable information (PII) confidential. This helps eliminate any external threats and protect sensitive information.
Regulations for data compliance usually vary across different countries, governments, states, industries. However, most businesses address 3 factors.
- The type of data that your company must protect
- The process that you need to implement in order to ensure data protection
- What will be the penalties in case your organization fails to comply with the data management regulations?
Importance of Compliant Data Management
Various factors make compliant data management practices must-have protocols in your business.
Data Protection
The world is becoming increasingly reliant on information sharing via technology. Therefore, a massive amount of data moves around on the internet every day. This makes the data vulnerable to security threats. Having compliant data management standards allows your business not just to protect yourself but also protect your customers.
Data compliance regulations push you to improve your data security practices and standards. This, in turn, will prevent data breaches and eliminate threats to your customers’ sensitive personal and financial data.
Helps Gain Customer’s Trust
The loss of customers’ trust and loyalty due to data breaches is one of the most significant blows your business can experience. According to an analysis report, 80% of the customers will leave the company in case of a data breach incident. Whereas 52% of the customers said, they would buy the same product or service from a different brand with advanced security protocols.
Therefore, if you do not want to lose a major chunk of your customer base to data breaches, you must take proper measures to deploy compliant management protocols. The more stringent your data protection standards are, the better it is. This will allow you to enjoy a status of a credible and trustworthy brand in the market.
It is Cost-Effective
Unable to follow compliant data management will not only cost losing your customers and reputation but also face hefty penalties by the governing authorities. According to a report published by the Ponemon Institute and IBM, on average, the cost of data breaches in 2020 alone reached $3.86 million.
While large corporations may withstand the blow of multi-million dollar data breaches, smaller companies will not be able to survive any such occurrence. Therefore, small-to-midsize businesses must especially focus on compliant data management practices.
Visibility
Compliant data management increases your company’s visibility of data within your organization. This way, it is easier for employees and consumers to find relevant data for analysis. The increased visibility helps you organize a business better and improve its productivity by allowing employees to find the right data to perform their jobs quickly.
It is Reliable
You can hire a data management consultant to establish compliant data management practices for your company. This will help you minimize any potential threats and errors. It also establishes policies and processes to build trust in the usage of data for decision-making within your company.
Reliable and up-to-date data will also help your company respond to market demands and changes more efficiently.
Scalability
Thanks to data management compliances – now you can scale your data and its usage occasions using repetitive processes. This will keep your metadata and data up to date at all times. The easy to repeat procedures can help your organization avoid any unnecessary waste of time and cost associated with duplication.
One of the classic examples is when your employees conduct the same data research repetitively. In such a case, you can now avoid the cost of re-running the same queries.
Secure Backup
One of the major data management protection regulations is for your business to make sure to backup customers and the company’s information. Therefore, following compliant data management practices will allow you to retrieve all the data if the primary data source ever becomes unavailable.
Conclusion
Whether you are a small-to-midsize business or a multinational corporation, compliance with data management protocols is one of the most important requirements in this day and age. Therefore, you must seek the assistance of a data management consultant to streamline your data processing, storage, and management activities.
Do this now and save your business from bigger and irreversible damages caused by data breaches. Remember, the longer you delay implementing data management compliance practices, the more vulnerable your organization and its data is to external threats by hackers and cybercriminals.
