Increase Growth & Innovation By Implementing Proper Information Governance & Data Privacy

Data privacy, Information Governance, and infrastructure security solutions are often associated with seemingly high and unnecessary costs, operational challenges, and the complexity attributed to regulatory compliance. This has lead to businesses having trouble dealing with rules and regulations including GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and/or other similar rules and regulations, which are created with one goal in mind - protecting consumer data and preventing the misuse of their information. 

 

The organizations that fail to tackle these tasks properly tend to face additional challenges in terms of costs, impeded workflows, and decreased innovation, especially if the company deals with clients on a multinational level. 

Data Privacy & Information Governance VS Innovation & Growth 

The high competitiveness of the modern business landscape has been driving organizations towards innovation and growth. If a company is not constantly increasing its profit margin and initiating growth through data-driven decision-making, it is highly likely that long-term success won’t happen. The need for innovation and continuous adaptation to the ever-changing business environment is present now more than ever. 

 

Global events like the COVID-19 pandemic require high levels of resourcefulness and quick problem-solving skills that can help you adapt and overcome newfound challenges. Proper data management, Information Governance, and overall privacy (whether it is your own sensitive data or the information that belongs to your customers) are the very fulcrum of an efficient and streamlined workflow that underpins a successful organization. One of the most significant components of these notions is being able to collect, store, manage, edit, archive, retrieve and analyze data in an effective and organized manner. 

 

Chief Data Officers and CIOs must ensure their business has a proper IG plan in place, as well as make sure they’ve implemented all the necessary best practice methods in terms of data privacy, for only then will they be capable of achieving the desired levels of innovation, and ultimately - growth. Data management systems and data owners need to have proper infrastructure for managing and rolling information pieces across a large number of employees, clients, and other users and perform these tasks in a way that will derive insights and drive new, innovative ideas.

 

In order to achieve this type of proactive and innovation-based environment, a company needs to reach satisfactory levels of data privacy, infrastructure security, strong compliance, and information governance. Here are some often overlooked aspects of implementing IG and data privacy solutions:

Fine-tune Policies and Eliminate Legacy Data 

Be sure to adjust and refresh outdated data storage systems by creating new backups, eliminating legacy and redundant backup tapes, and implementing an efficient data archiving policy. To reach these goals quickly and effectively, a company’s legal and compliance teams are to work closely with the IT department to create proper IG policies, manage data inventories, and take into account any regulatory and legal-hold obligations on their data. 

 

Having a highly-functioning data management and privacy plan can also help with the standardization of legal-based policies, which results in optimizing long-term storage and e-discovery costs.

Take Care of Unstructured Data Storage & Management 

Organizations often tend to store unstructured data, which includes confidential data and/or Personally Identifiable Information (PII). These pieces of information may be subject to privacy laws and their potential loss must be mitigated. To do that, businesses must have a sound strategy for scanning, collecting, identifying, managing, and sharing this type of sensitive data. The risk of losing intellectual property, trade secrets, and/or customer data can severely damage both operational processes and the company’s reputation. 

Automate Data, Message, Email Archiving

Making sure an organization is utilizing effective data and email archiving solutions should be among its top priorities. Communication channels and network systems are far too often under maintained and feature low levels of protection, leaving enough room for potential data breaches to happen. Businesses tend to have data archives that are underpinned by legacy technologies, which hinders data accessibility and information security.  

 

By updating and automating these processes through modern archiving solutions, the companies are able to streamline their IG methods, optimize data retention, more easily access and search bulked data, extract files, automate end-user email management, etc. 

Consider Moving Your Entire Infrastructure to the Cloud 

Although cloud migration may seem like a complex and costly procedure, it does pay off in the long run. The benefits are multifaceted as cloud systems provide a highly-functional, scalable, and cost-effective environment for literally all types of processes, including data management, security practices, policy updates, etc. 

Modernize and Upgrade E-discovery Systems

Although e-discovery technology is no longer in its nascent stages of development and is used across multiple industries and by numerous organizations, it is somewhat surprising how many companies are still utilizing first-generation tools for data search and retrieval. We recommend utilizing the latest versions of these emerging technologies in order to avoid potential pitfalls of outmoded tools. 

 

The latest e-discovery systems make sure that dataflows that permeate the complex ecosystems of collaborative platforms (which often harbor critical information) are easily and quickly searchable. This has proven to be extremely useful in terms of potential legal issues and the retrieval of data pertaining to the case at hand. 

Summing Up

It is crucial for modern businesses to understand that innovation and growth are emergent notions. In order to stir the creative pot, drive innovation and initiate growth, a company must first make sure all the components of its basic processes and infrastructures are being taken care of. Data privacy and information governance are critical aspects of running a business, and the risk of not having these processes automated and optimized is extremely high and can ruin a company’s reputation for good. 

 

You’ll agree that it is quite hard to come up with innovative ideas if the basic underlying operational processes are not optimized, streamlined, and automated. Menial work should be reduced to a bare minimum, and only then will your teams and departments be capable of improving their work and drive the business forward.