As a business you have a lot of data, data of your own creation from source systems or financial reporting and potentially customer data. Even without going into the details of GDPR, how safe and secure is the data?
In 2018 Heathrow Airport was fined £120,000 for losing a memory stick containing sensitive data (read about it here), and there are many more current stories of data breaches and fines in the news. Many of these are large companies with vast amounts of data with maybe 100’s or 1000’s of employees, but the chances are you have and use financial, staff or customer data meaning you could be at risk of a security issue.
One step is storing your data in a central database and automating the movement between systems or databases allows the effective application of data security at source, meaning not only is the data secure from an external perspective, it can also be made secure internally on a row by row or employee level basis.
Also any reporting built from this data can be further secured, for example a password protected excel report or PDF file. However, software-based reporting can have greater security built into the specification and administration, meaning not only is the data secure at source, it is secure in the output, via report access or general system access.
The financial and time cost to implement and maintain this type of approach to data security is very low compared to the potential cost and damage to your business of a security breach or fine. There are other benefits to be gained from adopting this approach, such as improved Data accuracy and Process efficiencies as they can be identified and built in at the same time as Data Security.
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