KYD - Know Your Data

Organizations that know the what’s, where’s, how’s, who’s, when’s and why’s of its data, and take effective control of it, are not only able to minimize risk but also to improve business performance.

If you are not KYDding, this is the moment to start Knowing Your Data.

For the next 5 years the size of data available is expected to grow at a rate of 40% per year, with this unprecedented growth of data, the size of unknown risk increases.

More than ever data is a core asset for every organization, in every industry, so it is critical that every organization can answer questions about its data, such as:

• Where it is stored?
• What is business critical?
• What is duplicate or obsolete
• What is sensitive and needs to be protected?
• Who uses it, has access to it or owns it?
• What is subject to regulatory or privacy norms?
• What should be kept and what can be deleted?

As an organization’s data grows in volume and complexity, answering these questions becomes an ever-increasing challenge.

This incomplete view of an organizations data is reason is what makes difficult to manage and to derive value from. On the other hand, a clear view, allows to identify what is useful to the business.

What are the effects of not KYDding?

A deficient knowledge of an organization’s data brings with it all the perverse effects of bad quality data, unknown data, or even dark data.

An organization that fails to efficiently manage its data - now commonly known as its most valuable asset – is exposed to a number of risks and costs, as data initially a business asset can easily become a business liability.

• Costs associated with regulatory fines for failing to comply with personal or regulated industry data norms or regulatory requests.
• Security risks associated with theft, illicit access to data or malicious use of data.
• Reputation risks associated with the misuse or disclosure of data.
• Infrastructure costs associated with the storage of duplicate, obsolete or with no business value.
• Efficiency costs associated with difficulties for users to quickly access and work the information they need when they need it and with the necessary quality.

These are but a few of the negative impacts that can occur, but most importantly not KYDding directly impacts business, impairing the decision processes and making hard to make timely decisions based on reliable and timely insights.

How does KYDding benefits the organization?

?Organizations need to start systematically assessing their data repositories to understand who owns the data, where it is located, its size and how it relates to the business. This will allow organizations to gain control over their data and efficiently derive business value from data.

Knowing Your Data and being able to efficiently manage it will allow organizations to mitigate regulatory and security risks, to reduce storage costs, to reduce the complexity of the data ecosystem, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of data usage, it will act as an enabler for more innovative usages of data, but more importantly, it will make organizations to gain competitiveness by a more efficient use of data and a substantial improvement of their decision processes.

Knowing Your Data means, that an organization is enabled to govern its data effectively and use it to drive deeper business insights.