Canada's business leaders must strategize to create a new competitive advantage in consumer privacy and data security
The Importance of Protecting Your Customer's Data
Everything Runs on Data
As our economy undergoes a digital transformation, it’s important that Canada’s business leaders strategize not to simply compete with Silicon Valley, but to distinguish themselves in the areas of consumer privacy and data security – this could, in many ways, become the new Canadian competitive advantage in a global digital economy.
The public media regularly reveals exposure and misuse of customer or employee privacy information. The pervasiveness of unreported occurrences is likely to be significant and equally disturbing to those reported. The reported occurrences commonly include lost media, unauthorized access by outsiders, or inappropriate access by insiders. When such exposures are made public the affected organization is often penalized through economic disincentives such as loss of customer confidence affecting sales, government fines, and costly credit monitoring. However, an organization can reduce or mitigate the likelihood of abusive access to privacy information by implementing appropriate security controls that are directive, preventative, and detective.
Understanding how best to manage and protect personal information can be a difficult task for small businesses, so we hope our new mini-quiz will help to identify some issues that organizations need to be aware of.
