Technology Safe

In a knowledge-based economy, where everything is always on- demand and live-streaming, the old adage of having the whole world in the palm of one’s hand, for all intent and purposes is a reality.

The fast paced advances that we’ve seen in mobile technology have opened a wide swath of possibilities to how corporations conduct their business to how they support employees and reach their customers. Enterprise mobility is one of those tools that like a hammer, adds to the business’ toolbox and makes every problem look small.

Part of that success is scalable; it’s replicable and most important it’s manageable. These three things weren’t always compatible, but we’re seeing developers tackle problems ahead of impact. Apps are being introduced on a daily basis that address issues, recognize problems and enhance the user experience, both customizable and in real time.

This has created more opportunities for businesses, as both employees and customers pick up their devices —smartphone, tablets and laptops to access the internet from wherever they are, whenever they choose and it’s in this stay connected Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment that makes enterprise mobility feasible. But giving employees total access to the company’s information has risks, making confidential data vulnerable to hacks and other security concerns.

And the responsibility to protect information isn’t the employees or the customers, but in effect becomes the enterprise’s burden. Because as a customer I’ve only loaned you my data, my rights haven’t been given or bartered away, beyond the reasonable time frame that it took for me to conclude my business with you.   And while the convenience is shared, your website having provided a gateway as if by magic on my sidebar and me going ahead and clicking, doesn’t absolve how we became engaged.  After all, entrapment in the digital world leaves footprints, and my use of any app is limited.  But, I do love the appeal of interfacing seamlessly without stepping a foot outside of my door, but the truth is I believed it when I read that my data was, I was assured, safe from hackers.

So, imagine my surprise when I received a letter via snail mail!

Interestingly enough, I can hardly recall that transaction.  It seems that data breaches can take on average, up to 200 days to detect, that’s quite a long time.   And scrambling to assess the extent of the damage, before acting on it and then issuing new credit cards, seems a pathetic waste.   Did you know that $200billion is the projected global economy loss due to a data breach?  Me either.    It seems an expensive way of conducting business in a digital world.  Come to think of it, it might be cheaper to maintain an ongoing dialogue with everyone and to hire cyber-security to help keep what needs to be safe, safe.