Discover Why data compliance is really important for your business...

Data compliance plays a crucial role when implementing modern data practices, especially when considering something like dark data, due to its potential for holding hidden insights and sensitive information. As businesses collect and store an increasing amount of data, they need to ensure that they’re adhering to the necessary data compliance regulations.

There can be major consequences when failing to adhere to these regulations that can have a great impact on a business. Data breaches, unauthorised data sharing, and privacy violations can lead to both financial losses and legal disputes that have the potential to majorly impact even the largest of businesses.

What is dark data?

Dark data is unstructured, or semi-structured, data that could include personal or sensitive information. When adhering to data compliance regulations, businesses need to ensure that the data adheres to the same controls and policies as structured data. Dark data must be appropriately managed, secured and stored to ensure compliance with laws such as GDPR, whilst also considering minimising the risks of unauthorised access or a potential data breach of sensitive information.

Having unstructured, dark data within your modern landscape can carry a number of risks:

• Security risks: Dark data is a potential security risk, as it may contain sensitive or outdated vulnerable information that could be exploited by cybercriminals if left unprotected.
• Compliance concerns: Failure to address and govern dark data can lead to compliance concerns, as it may contain information such as personal or financial data that could be subject to data protection regulations.
• Missed insights: Businesses could easily miss valuable insights hidden within the dark data, depriving you of opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Data compliance regulations, like GDPR, emphasise the need for organisations to manage data responsibly. Being compliant ensures that any of your dark data containing sensitive information is properly protected and retained for the required duration, reducing any legal or regulatory risks. Being data compliant requires businesses to establish clear policies and procedures for data retention and deletion. This is an invaluable practice when looking to tackle dark data, as it aids businesses in determining what data should be kept and what can be safely discarded.

Unlocking the benefits of compliance

As we know, being compliant is essential for any business. However, it’s worth nothing that businesses can gain advantages beyond just reducing legal risks:

• Being data compliant builds trust with customers, stakeholders and employees. Building trust is a powerful asset that can enhance your brand's reputation, increase customer loyalty and strengthen relationships with key stakeholders.
• Compliance ensures that your business is aware of any potential risks and can take proactive measures to mitigate them quickly and effectively. Being aware of any emerging threats and mitigating them not only protects a business from any legal implications but also positions them as a forward-thinking industry leader.
• Compliant businesses gain a competitive advantage by demonstrating their commitment to data privacy and security. Being compliant can be a significant differentiator within their market as customers will prioritise working with businesses that are compliant over those that are not.

The importance of data compliance in modern data practices cannot be overstated, especially when dealing with challenges such as dark data. By aligning data compliance with dark data management strategies, businesses can look to not just reduce their security and compliance risks but also unlock untapped hidden insights within their data archives.

Data compliance goes beyond the legal requirements and is a fundamental aspect of responsible modern data practices. As the data landscape continues to rapidly evolve, a commitment to data compliance is fundamental for businesses to continue to grow.

To be able to take full advantage of dark data, it needs to be classified, protected and governed so that you can understand the valuable data that you have available and ensure it is appropriately organised to unleash its full potential.

Here at Centrality, we run Microsoft-funded workshops looking at how you can protect and govern sensitive data whilst keeping your business compliant. These workshops leverage Microsoft tools such as Purview to provide you with insights that you need to better discover, protect and master data governance of your corporate data.

Interested in finding out more? Visit our workshop page