If you’re a regular reader, then you know that my pieces are typically more universal than they are industry-specific – though I have been known to opine in such particular places as local government and oil and gas. Today, however, I’d like to speak to retailers, where the opportunities to Do Information Right™ seem markedly ripe (even as the lessons remain broadly applicable).
Consider the following:
| According to the 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report from Verizon, there were 870 confirmed incidents and breaches at retail businesses globally in 2021. Perhaps more alarming, 77% of retailers were hit by a ransomware attack that year, up from 44% in 2020. | Meanwhile, the 2022 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report found the global average cost of a retail data breach last year reached some $3.28 million; a little quick math then tells us that related losses came to between $790 million and $2.85 billion.[1] |
These figures make compellingly clear that, as retailers, you need to take better care of your information – something that, done properly, requires vital functions like finance, customer service, operations, loss prevention, and IT to work together to secure, track, and monitor all the data in your charge. Such collaboration is critical to achieving consistency across your company’s policies, processes, and technologies, and to reducing fraud, heightening security and privacy, and ensuring the currency and accuracy of your information. In turn, this means the whole company can operate more safely and profitably than it currently does.
Consider what Etsy fraud operations chief John Matas told NRF Protect 2022: “Post-Covid, the fraud really just exploded, mainly in the form of account security, account takeovers, and a significant increase in non-human attacks. We were a fairly static workforce that was accustomed to dealing with X percent of transactions, and we were overwhelmed.” Banding together is a “must” to help lighten the load, as is engaging some outside help if you lack the people and/or time to pull everyone together.
Start with Your Business Needs
The process begins by understanding that reducing your level of overall vulnerability is much more a function of how you govern your information than it is of the technologies you use to accomplish it – after all, what you deploy and how you orchestrate it can’t be effective if it doesn’t reflect your governance strategy.
In turn, the strategy you develop must address the business needs of every department that has company data to care for and feed – which is to say, pretty much every department. Thanks to today’s uncertain economy, one of most currently compelling of these needs is risk reduction, and information governance is a proven way to accomplish this by driving uncertainties out of your data management.
It also has the added benefit of giving you and your collaborators the real opportunity to be company heroes, as senior managers fixate on their need to root out vulnerabilities wherever they are found.
So tell me: how can I help?
| To get started, I invite you to download our FREE guide 5 Steps to Doing Information Right™. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. |
[1] The range here is due to varying definitions, but it’s clear the problem is expensive and on the rise.