Data Access Challenges: When the Right People Can’t Access the Right Data

Data is an enterprise’s most valuable asset. Quality data provides companies with a competitive edge and drives the development of new products and services, but only when organizations can fully utilize it. Today, data access challenges are making it harder and harder for them to readily access their treasure trove of data. With cybersecurity concerns, government regulations, and data governance prompting organizations to lock down this precious resource tighter and tighter, businesses increasingly risk leaving key growth insights on the table.

A survey of 100 data leaders in the US and Europe conducted by Bloor Research showed that 60 percent of them were unable to use more than 40 percent of their data because of privacy concerns. As for the rest of the data, 84 percent responded they could eventually access it within a week.

What is causing these data access challenges? According to The State of Data Analytics: Key Challenges in a Strict Security and Privacy Environment, which surveyed 100 leaders in the US, France, UK, and Germany, leaders cited cybersecurity as a key roadblock to data accessibility. A total of 67 percent of the respondents said access to useful data was restricted because of governance mandates; 61.2 percent said data protection reduced the value of their data; and 56.6 percent noted that complex, ad hoc, or manual data access processes created challenges.

Opportunity Costs of Data Deprivation

Useful data is key for future proofing any business today, McKinsey recently reported. “Executives in every industry know that data is important. Without it, there can be no digital transformation to propel the organization past competitors. There are no analytics driving new sources of revenue,” the report continued.  “Even running the basic business well isn’t possible.”

But it is increasingly challenging for organizations to strike the balance of making data accessible while ensuring their proprietary data, confidential resources, and customer personal identifying information is safe and compliant. What is being lost in companies whose data access challenges mean that nearly half of their data is tied up in a morass of protection?

The opportunity costs of underutilizing data can be significant. The top reason leaders surveyed in the Bloor Research cited for using their data was to help their organization gain a competitive advantage (56%). A total of 49 percent said leveraging relevant data is key for finding ways to reduce costs, 46 percent cited improving efficiency, and 40 percent said data analysis propels the development of new products, services, and revenue streams.

Companies lose out on more than the insights data provides when the information is not easily available to those who need it to help propel business growth. They waste resources trying to access the data and make it useful for analysis. Respondents to McKinsey’s 2019 Global Data Transformation Survey reported that an average of 30 percent of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and data access challenges.

Data Governance Gone Wrong

A total of 70 percent of the respondents to the Bloor survey said they currently have, or plan to invest in, a data privacy solution within the next year. The key, of course, is choosing protection that does not create more impenetrable data prisons, but ensures data is a value-added commodity for their organizations.

Quality data governance assures that data is relevant and readily available, McKinsey noted. “The problem is that most governance programs today are ineffective.”

The need to protect customer information, dodge data breaches, and comply with ever evolving regulatory requirements is essential to avoid the high cost of data landing in the wrong hands and your company being held hostage by cybercriminals. Addressing those realities with data protection that provides easy accessibility is a necessity for organizations to use their most valuable asset to its full potential.

Breaking Through Data Access Challenges

Data governance is essential to creating consistent and proper data handling and understanding where specific data exists within the organization. Building reliable data governance involves ensuring high data quality across the entire data lifecycle, including data controls that support business objectives: where data originated, where it is going and who is using it.

In the fast-paced business world, organizations absolutely need safe, real-time access to their critical information. PKWARE understands the need to manage complex access rights so the right data can be accessed by the right people at the right time. Our recently released solution, PK Dynamic Masking, delivers precisely that. Using PK Dynamic Masking, organizations can easily enforce complex data access policies that limit the exposure of sensitive data while ensuring mission critical applications that require access to actual production data operate as designed with no impact to the end user. Applying data privacy and security actions in real time ensures that access to sensitive data remains tightly controlled and based on both users’ roles and organization policies.

See PK Dynamic Masking and other PKWARE data security solutions in action by requesting a free demo now.