How important is the protection of your data? What would happen to your business if something happened to your data? Is this a key consideration in your system designs, or simply an afterthought when you have time to get around to it?
When I am thinking of data protection there are a lot of factors to be considered. The first on that most companies seem to understand and attempt is to provide some sort of data backups. More often than not, a backup process is defined. However, it is frequently not audited or tested. When the time comes to use your backup repository it may not work at all, or only partially.
Your data also needs protection from intruders. Intruders most often are internal. Often they are external. Either way, it is essential to isolate access and protect sensitive data. With today’s technology there is little excuse for hackers obtaining sensitive data.
Another aspect of protecting data is data accuracy and utility. Dirty data is less useful, and can lead to inaccurate conclusions. I once worked on a data warehouse that was used to determine business financial decisions, that if not accurate, the business could become bankrupt as a result of the inaccuracy.
Dirty data also has a cost associated with it in terms of cleansing or redundant work. Think how complicated it is to maintain contact information in a central data warehouse when pulling data from multiple systems. It is a lot easier if the different systems data is accurate, even if it is not current.
How important is data to you? Share your thoughts by email to btaylor@sswug.org or leave your comments here.
Cheers,
Ben