Why Data Security Is Important To Managers?
With the increased threat of cybersecurity breaches in businesses, managers have an essential role to play in ensuring that their companies remain protected. Management and leadership teams set the tone for cybersecurity throughout any organization. They ultimately decide resource allocation, security practices, talent recruitment, and disaster response plans.
There are many reasons why managers should play a key role in cybersecurity efforts. Through active involvement, you can prevent costly business disruptions and protect your trade secrets. Furthermore, managers should be aware that cybersecurity is a company-wide concern. All departments need to work in unison when detecting and preventing data breaches- and managers play an essential leadership role during the entire process.
The following are reasons why data security is important for managers.
- Prevent Business Disruptions
Of all employees in any business, a data breach affects managers the most. This is because management will have to deal with the immediate consequences of a threat- including preventing data loss and protecting the company’s image. Indeed, those at the top are often scrutinized strongly when a data breach occurs. Even if the threat was caused by a negligent employee (such as clicking on a phishing email), managers are often held accountable for such events.
Even worse, any disruptions that occur to your business will affect overall performance. Just think of Yahoo and how their data breach of 3 Billon consumer accounts affected their sale price. Taking cybersecurity seriously can help managers prevent such costly disruptions and ensure business continuity.
- Protect Trade Secrets
Trade secrets are one of the most important assets that managers hold. Unfortunately, hackers also know this and are increasingly targeting sensitive trade data. If such information were to be compromised, your company would incur a significant financial loss. This is why managers should be actively involved in risk assessment, network monitoring, data encryption, and employee training. These steps help protect sensitive business data from hacking attempts.
- Ensure Data Integrity
Cybersecurity threats affect more than just the security of your data. They can also affect data integrity because hackers are capable of altering, deleting, and editing data. If your sensitive company data is altered, it may affect business operations in many different ways. For example, altered patient records may result in a misdiagnosis or wrong treatment. Furthermore, altered data may no longer be confidential to only relevant personnel.
Managers can prevent data integrity issues by being involved in data security practices. For example, managers should control who has access to sensitive data while keeping their internal networks secure.
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- Protect The Reputation Of Your Business
One of the most significant consequences of a data breach is a damaged reputation. As previously mentioned, managers are perhaps the most affected by reputational issues arising from a data breach. Customers tend to lose faith in any business that can’t protect their sensitive information. This means that any data breach affecting credit card numbers, names, addresses, or social security numbers could result in loss of business. And most companies have a hard time regaining customer loyalty after a breach happens.
Managers should be at the forefront of promoting data security campaigns to prevent potential breaches. If your company deals with sensitive customer information, you should work closely with IT professionals to encrypt such data, protect information flows, and remain informed about emergent threats.
- Avoid Significant Financial Loss
Perhaps the most obvious benefit of data security for managers is avoiding financial loss. Data breaches often come with costly consequences. For example, the Equifax hacking of 147 million customers resulted in $439 million spent on recovery costs. The Starwood hacking that affected Marriot customers resulted in a 6.9% drop in Marriot share prices.
Managers can help their companies avoid such costly financial consequences by having a disaster response plan in place. This involves frequent data backups, controlling access to sensitive data streams, and implementing perimeter security (such as anti-malware and anti-ransomware in collaboration with the IT staff).
When managers take data security seriously, they set the tone for everyone else in the organization. Furthermore, issues such as resource allocation, employee negligence, and hacking activity can be detected and addressed much faster when managers are involved throughout the process.