FEATURE
cybersecurityeurope
Do cyber threats perceive a value in your enterprise data that you’ve missed? Can that value go up as well as down? Calculating minds understand the data economy rules.
THE WIKIS DEFINE THE ‘DATA ECONOMY’ AS A GLOBAL DIGITAL INTER-SYSTEM IN WHICH DATA TYPES ARE GATHERED, organised, processed and exchanged by a network of vendors and agencies to derive value from the information thus accumulated. This definition has assumed broader resonance, however, as more sections of the data economy undergo programmes of digital transformation, and start to discover, perhaps for the first time, the full extent of their data assets and the full extent of those assets’ value. This means that a general appreciation of data economy dynamics, at least, should exist around Europe’s c-suites and boardrooms. Cyber security process plays an important part in this assessment: it is because data has an intrinsic value that cyber criminals BRIEF
and other threats try to steal it for resale and other nefarious exploitations. Targeted organisations that want to understand the intrinsic value of their data assets should factor its attractiveness to hackers into their calculations. (Additional value criteria could include intellectual property value and value for business analytics.) The calculation of value naturally depends on the type of data under evaluation. Some data, such as intellectual property (IP) and data-protected customer data is innately valuable. Other data holds value because if anything unlawful happens to it, the data owner could be penalised by regulator. Some data owners want to find out how much their data is worth so that they can decide how much of their IT security budgets they should spend to protect it: little point in defending relatively worthless data with expensive arrays of security. Data value might also be a decisive metric for data that’s insured against cyber attack. Data is so important to businesses today that 67% of EMEA businesses that responded to Evolution’s Data Economy Report 2017 reckoned it should be ‘shown as an asset on the company balance sheet’. Some respondents went as far as to say the data their company holds is ‘more valuable than the people it employs’. It is evident that some of the cyber criminals who hack into an organisation’s IT systems and steal data do so to feed a
WHERE DATA ECONOMIES ADD VALUE... Increasing opportunities for the creation of financial value for businesses and other organisations through the analysis and interpretation of different types of data include: Creation of high-value employment opportunities
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from the demand for the skilled labour needed to undertake data analytics or other data economy services; Efficiencies in the management of
