DataOpsZone

Here’s a common scenario for most businesses.

A potential customer visits your website, and instantly you have data about their browser and site interactions. At some point, that potential customer decides to share some information with you. For example, they give you their name and email address in order to receive your newsletter. Their personal information is now in your system. Next, the customer emails or calls about services or price levels. Your system saves these messages, too.

Now, let’s say the customer decides to buy a product and gives you their credit card details. From there, you expand your product offerings and email your customer to offer them discounts. And finally (it’s sad, but it happens), your customer might cancel their purchase of your product.

These are all things that you might do during the acquisition, retention, and management of a customer.

All of this sounds pretty reasonable as part of business operations, right? Generally, yes. But ask yourself these questions:

• Are you actually using everything you collected? Or are you collecting it just in case?
• Can any of the data you’re collecting be used to identify a specific person?
• If a customer asks what data you have about them, can you give them a list?
• Is anything you collected protected by law?
• If a customer wants to end their relationship with you and asks that all their data be deleted, can you do it? Are you actually required to do so?

If you struggled to answer these questions, don’t worry! They aren’t always easy questions to answer. By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to ensure proper data compliance in your small business. We’ll achieve that by answering these four questions:

1. What is data compliance, and why do you need it?
2. What are some major standards involved in data compliance?
3. What’s unique about data compliance for small businesses?
4. What are the right practices to put in place to improve data compliance in your small business?

Continue reading “What Is Data Compliance for Small Business?”

Data is highly valuable. Your organization possesses not only your data, but also your customers’ as well. Any kind of data theft or misuse may lead to huge monetary loss. In the worst case, your customers may sue you, or your organization may face bankruptcy.

So, if the data grows beyond your storage capacity, where should you store it? Let’s rephrase the question. How can you store the data securely?

The answer is data centers. But how can you be sure a data center will keep your data safe? Also, how will you know whether the data center facility is right for your storage needs? You carry out audits.

At any time, you can carry out an audit to check a data center’s performance. You can check the compliance standards and whether the facility is ready to operate. Sometimes, customers themselves carry out auditing activities. Other times, they hire a third party for auditing.

In this post, you’ll find out some important auditing activities to carry out before choosing a data center. You’ll learn what to ask while auditing the data center, so you’ll know whether the facility will keep your data safe. You’ll also find out whether the data center is certified and how its staffers would handle power outages or natural disasters. Learning all these details is an important part of finding out how to DevOps your data.

Let’s get started.

Continue reading “Why Audit a Data Center? 5 Checks to Ask About”

As information systems advance, data generation increases. There was a time humans owned and generated data. But for the past few years, the technology trends have been changing. With these changes, the definition of data has broadened. For instance, it’s not necessary for data to have a structure, like having the same data type or organization pattern. In other words, the data may contain different data types that are randomly arranged. Machines can generate information as well. Data can also exist outside the corporate boundaries. Data is growing as time goes by. We’re using the term “big data” to describe this portfolio of data. So, while thinking about how this data can be managed for better reporting, you may wonder, how does big data come into the picture?

In this post, we’ll discuss how big data has improved the audit process. But before that, we’ll get to know what big data is.

Continue reading “How Has Big Data Improved the Audit Process?”