12 Benefits of Data Protection for Business Success

With the growing number of data breaches, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about how their data is used. Organisations can take advantage of this trend by treating data protection and user privacy as product features.

Data privacy has been viewed as a burden that carries with it significant costs and few tangible benefits. This has been compounded historically by the aim of gathering as much data as possible about users, thus providing greater opportunities for monetizing the data, such as through targeted advertising. This article aims to educate businesses on the benefits of data protection.

Benefits of data protection Implementation

• Better Business Management – because the Data Protection Act requires better management and storage of information, this can generally lead to better business practices. Management of data and storage of information within your company will be better handled with a little knowledge of the law and the requirements placed on your business.
• Avoiding Fines – benefits of data protection registration through us includes guidance on the 8 data protection principles and information ensuring your business is compliant. This allows you to avoid the potential fines.
• Legal Compliance –  Making sure your company is compliant with all the requirements laid down by the law allows you to avoid unnecessary fines and legal headaches.
• Customer Security – registration with The ICO means your business is issued with a data protection registration number. Displaying this on your business website and correspondence instills faith in the minds of your customers. They will know that any data their give you will be handled properly and in good faith, making them more willing to share their personal information.

Also Read: How Being Data Protection Trained Can Help With Job Retention

Disadvantages of Data Protection Registration

• The Cost – some might say the cost of data protection registration is prohibitive. However, our low-cost service ensures registration is far less taxing on your wallet.
• Training – running a business which needs to register as a data controller means you will need to train all your staff to ensure that data is properly handled in accordance with the act. Files need to be secured, paperwork containing personal data should be shredded and much more.
• Strict Maintenance of Data – as a “data controller” you will be expected to abide by the data protection principles and properly maintain data you gather within the remit of the law.
• Data Protection Procedures – similarly, if you have any home-workers who may take a laptop home with them, you will need to ensure that these are properly secured and encrypted to prevent data falling into the wrong hands. Many businesses have found themselves being fined for such breaches of data protection – even ones which are out of their hands.

Aside from the benefits of data protection and its disadvantages we will now process to the 12 brief explanation about the benefits of data protection for business success.

1. To meet compliance requirements

Organizations that do not implement privacy protection face huge fines in the tens of millions of dollars and up to 20-year penalties for non-compliance with laws, regulations, standards and their own published privacy and security notices.

2. To prevent breaches that hurt businesses

A privacy principle that is common to all international privacy principles, and a requirement in all data protection and privacy legal requirements is implementing strong security safeguards to protect personal data. Organizations that implement such controls will, as a result, reduce the number of security incidents that result in privacy breaches.

3. To prevent breaches that hurt data subjects / individuals

Privacy protections involve ensuring strong security for personal data and all the associated activities involved with collecting, storing, processing, accessing transmitting, sharing and disposing of the data. Historically organizations have not had comprehensive, strong data security controls implemented throughout the entire enterprise, through to every end-device. By implementing security controls for personal data, breaches that negatively impact the data subjects will be avoided.

4. To maintain and improve brand value

Organizations that explicitly make clear that protecting the privacy of their consumers is a primary goal, care about their consumers’ privacy, and support meeting that goal with transparent and consistently followed privacy practices that demonstrate this care, will build emotional connections to their brand, which will improve brand value.

5.    To strengthen and grow business

These attitudes seem to be similar worldwide. Businesses that implement privacy protections, which provide such controls, will strengthen and grow their business, as they become preferred by consumers over their competitors which do not provide such controls.

6. To support ethics

Most organizations have established business ethics policies, or a code of ethics. Even those that haven’t still need to follow ethical practices if they expect to stay in business for any length of time. Such ethics policies typically indicate something to the effect that confidential information will be handled responsibly, not used in business activities in ways that do harm as a result, and used only as indicated for business purposes.

7. To maintain public, investor and customer trust

Accordingly, 65% of individuals whose personal data was breached lost trust in the organization that experienced the breach either directly, or as a result of a breach in one of their contracted vendors. One in four individuals breached took their business elsewhere. Organizations that do not implement privacy protections, and subsequently experience breaches, will lose trust, which in turn will result in lower profits and fewer customers. Hence the benefits of data protection implementation greatly outweight not prioritizing it.

8. To support your customers’ wishes

The general public is much more privacy aware now than they have ever been before. And, as our youngest population learn more about privacy throughout grade schools and high schools, they are having increased expectations, even before entering adulthood, that they have increasing rights over how their own personal data is collected, used, analyzed, and shared. The general public is becoming more aware of all their increasing rights to tell those that collect their personal data that they expect to have their personal data protected, and have rights to access and control their personal data.

9. To be a competitive differentiator and gain a competitive advantage

These significant worries about privacy, and how it impacts the actions of the public, demonstrate that if your organization can show that you truly care about the privacy of the personal data your collect and processes, you will have a significant advantage over your competitors who do not make privacy a priority.

10. To increase physical safety

Lack of privacy protections has resulted in tragic physical harms to the associated individuals. One of the first USA state privacy laws, the “Driver’s Privacy Protection Act” which was implemented in California in 1997, was created largely as a response to the 1989 murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, an actress on the USA TV show “My Sister Sam” who was stalked by a fan who obtained her home address simply by going to the California State Department of Transportation then went to her home and shot her. Incidents similar to this have continued, worldwide, to the present. Protecting personal data so often also protects the physical safety of the data subjects.

11. To build customer loyalty

In 2017, research firm Baringa Partners conducted a survey about consumer attitudes toward data protection. Here’s a portion of their findings:

“Our results reveal companies risk losing up to 55% of customers if they suffer a significant personal data leak. We looked at consumer attitudes towards companies in the banking, insurance, energy, and TV, phone and internet sectors. We found that, in the event of a data breach, 30% of people would switch provider immediately and a further 25% would wait to see a media response or what others say and do before switching to another provider.”

Research firm Baringa Partners

And it isn’t just large corporations at risk. All sizes of organizations will lose customers following a breach.

12. To support innovation

Too many people claim that building security and privacy controls into new technologies, products and services stifles innovation. That is complete hogwash! Actually, when privacy is purposefully addressed within new innovations, it expands and improves innovations. It does not inhibit them. The public is demanding that privacy be protected. Privacy should be viewed as not just a differentiator or something to be done if legally required, but a standard requirement for any new technology or service involving personal data. It takes more innovation to create secure privacy-protecting devices that mitigate privacy risk than it does to simply leave out such controls.

If you have finished reading this article till the end, we hope that businesses can truly understand and value the benefits of data protection.

Also Read: The Importance of Penetration Testing for Businesses