You’ve heard it said, ‘data is the new oil’ meaning that in the age of technology, data is the new commodity that businesses mine, where fortunes are amassed, and entire economies are born.
The reference dates to The Economist article from 2017, referring to the tech giants like Apple and Amazon that were mining data about their users and how trust laws may be out of date to judge the new current commodity. But the fact is data is the asset that almost all companies are dependent on in today’s economy.
What company could not benefit from understanding more about their data – whether it be customer data, operational data, financial data or usage data? All companies can gain insight from the data they’ve been collecting.
Wired notes that, “[it’s] in a digital economy where data is more valuable than ever. It’s the key to the smooth functionality of everything from the government to local companies. Without it, progress would halt.”
When it comes to using data to better manage your business strategy and operations, there’s never been a better time to get started. With the growth of cloud-based solutions, which can collect large amounts of data and store in the cloud, the cost of capturing and managing massive amounts of data has never been more affordable for most companies.
Cloud-based Access Control Data
As security becomes viewed more as an IT system rather than a stand alone system, the opportunity for all companies to include access control data into the collection presents itself. Cloud-based access control allows you to collect data to understand your security challenges unlike on-prem solutions that are not designed to track and keep data. Traditional security solutions keep data siloed as it cannot be connected with other IT solutions.
Challenges Without Access to Data
Data collection is not enough. You need to use data to help you create a better security plan for your business. Many businesses have the same problem: Data is locked in the system.
When access control data is locked away it means you can only get a fragmented view of your security effectiveness. If you can’t meet compliance requirements, like regulatory and compliance policies, your data is rendered useless. Without access to data, it’s hard to find anomalies or bring them to the forefront so you can make better data-driven decisions.
The lack of access control data leads to inefficient diagnosis of security threats and you can be left blind-sided. Data will allow you to see the big picture and manage who has what access quickly and efficiently. It should also let you dive into details and identify threats more easily.
Too Much Data
On the flip side, even if you can trap and collect all the data, how can you turn that into actionable insights? One of the challenges many businesses talk about is that they have so much data that they can’t do anything with it.
It’s a travesty of the digital age – we have so much data that there’s no way to render it useful to make actionable decisions or gain insights. How often do we collect point-in-time assessments that require us to manually cobble together disparate data points from separate and non-integrated systems? This leaves us investing hours of valuable time in labor-intensive analysis that is insufficient and hard to scale. In the end, we still have no real picture into the organization’s security posture.
What Should the Data Experience Look Like?
What should you expect from a data driven digital security solution? Data should be used to improve visibility into your security solution to understand who has access to what areas of your business and when. It should be easy to surface potential issues quickly and in such a way that makes it possible to act on.
Advanced analytics should be built into your access control solution so you can have a comprehensive view of your security program. With today’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, better analytics help you improve incident response and better protect your property, people, and reputation.
When you have better insights, you can proactively manage your security posture and help turn actionable insights into better informed, data-driven decisions.
It is these data barriers that led us to build Brivo Access with a focus on data. Brivo Access is built on a 4th generation data infrastructure and includes the Data Explorer function. This allows customers to customize and visualize their data and perhaps see things that they never saw before.
Providing industry leadership is important to Brivo and with Brivo Access we have ushered in a new era. Until now, there hasn’t been a cloud access platform built to support the data needs of the largest enterprise users. We are taking the industry into a new space where cloud-based security services can penetrate the enterprise, but can also be right-sized for any business through edition purchasing options.
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