This article explores the dual nature of data in the modern business landscape, highlighting both its transformative potential and the associated challenges of privacy protection. It emphasizes the importance of responsible data management practices, compliance with data protection laws, and striking a balance between data utilization and customer privacy.
The potential of data lies in its ability to transform unclassified information into actionable insights, driving efficiency, value, and innovation across all business sectors. Organizations that leverage data are able to serve their clients, stakeholders, and customers more efficiently and unleash opportunities to stay ahead of the competitors. Despite its advantages, data brings along equal if not more challenges.
The biggest challenge is to manage data without violating the obligations set forth by the regulatory frameworks like EU-GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc., that emphasize responsible data handling from the collection stage to the stage of disposal. It is important to note that most data protection laws, like EU-GDPR, PIPEDA, POPIA, PDPL, etc., mandate lawful, limited, and justified processing of data, along with granting the right to get their personal information deleted, erased, or destroyed. The businesses that fail to comply with data protection laws have to pay hefty fines, struggle with operational downtime, lose customers, and face reputational damage. Does this mean that businesses must avoid collecting customer data at all? Businesses accumulate data to operate in an uninterrupted manner, improve their products & services, and identify the needs of their customers. However, many a time, they unintentionally hoard unclassified information, which creates data security issues and violates the data protection principles of the governing laws. Storing excessive data beyond the retention period not only increases cybersecurity risks and total operational costs but also has high energy consumption, depleting non-renewable energy resources and adding to environmental challenges. The customers are not against an organization utilizing their data, but what they expect of a business is to not jeopardize the privacy of sensitive information
DATA PRIVACY DATA PROTECTION GDPR CUSTOMER DATA CYBERSECURITY
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