Despite the fact that the Internet has become a key pillar in the workings of modern day society, there is still a massive knowledge gap between Internet users and how the Internet actually operates.
Many people have no idea what data security actually means, how it works, or why it’s important. They hope no one can see what it is they’re doing, and then just sort of leave it at that.
For companies, government agencies, and research institutions, the threat is even higher—especially when you’re dealing with highly confidential information. Although, any single user’s information is considered confidential, there is also sensitive information (e.g. legal matters, regulatory affairs, intellectual property protection, mergers and acquisitions, research and development materials) that, when breached, incur significant challenges and costs for institutions.
In America, people have become numb to the headlines that alert the masses of huge data breaches. Do you remember the Target incident that compromised nearly 40 million credit card holders? Or when Sony was cyber-attacked by North Korea? Or what about when 200 million Yahoo users had their information stolen, ready to be sold to a willing buyer?
The public reads these headlines, shrugs, and then goes about their day. In just the past few years, over 900,000,000 records of personally identifiable information have been stolen in the United States.
For institutions especially the ones being threatened by cyber-attacks and even internal leaks, that lackadaisical solution doesn’t quite cut it. Executives get fired, billion-dollar mergers fall through, employees lose faith, and customers flee to more secure platforms and providers.
Which is why the European Union has recently made huge strides in regards to personal data security and information sharing. They take things much more seriously than the United States—hence why there is a cookie banner present whenever you visit a website from Europe (such as Virgin.com).
Recently, the GDPR—the EU General Data Protection Regulation—was designed to keep data privacy laws consistent all across Europe, making sure that the information of users did not fall into the wrong hands. The GDPR was approved by the EU Parliament on April 14th, 2016, and by May 25, 2018 any organization not in complete compliance will face steep fines, making their cooperation imperative.
Think of the GDPR as a move toward preventative medicine instead of treating the symptoms of the issue. According to DocEx, a configurable SaaS solution for the distribution of enterprise class information, “The average cost per incident of insider fraud is $412,000 and the average loss per industry is $15 million over ten years. In several instances, damages reached more than $1 billion.”
Consider the magnitude of that sort of financial loss—not counting the potential market share and loyalty hit that comes along with that sort of data breach.
Companies like DocEx position themselves as solutions to the problem before it even becomes a problem. They allow enterprises to integrate their software into their current processes, supporting multi-national enterprises with different packages for sharing information—then handling end-to-end security and real-time analytics. In addition, admins can set permissions based data sensitivity and, worst case scenario, stop or even retract sent information before the problem spirals out of control.
As big data and rapidly scaling companies turn more and more digital, the industries responsible for protecting that data will only continue to grow exponentially beside them. The real question is at what point multi-national companies will decide it’s better to invest more in preventing the problem, than shelling out millions to solve it once the damage has been done.