Bell Business Insights newsletter

A letter from the executive office

How's this for an eye-opening statistic: in the next 48 hours, the world will create about 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of data, the same amount of information that was created by all of humanity since the dawn of civilization through 2003. The rate of data creation is expected to accelerate, too. One research report estimates that the 800 exabytes of digital information created by 2009 will expand to 35,000 exabytes by 2020, a 44-fold increase.

What does the explosion of data mean for your organization? Data can be used in incredibly powerful ways that transform businesses — but it also introduces new risks that an organization must manage diligently.

The hard reality is that just one breach can effectively destroy a company, depending on what kind of data is lost or stolen. As our reliance on data grows, so do the requirements to store, process and transmit it with the utmost of care. This is true whether your IT is managed in-house or by a service provider. Many organizations wonder if cloud computing will expose them to even greater levels of data risk, but the better question they might pose is, ?How much risk are we exposed to already by our current data management practices??

In this edition of Bell Business Insights we explore the steps you can take to accurately assess the risks your organization faces in relation to the kinds of data it has and how it is used. We also present a unique way to think about how to mitigate the risks posed by data by better managing the people, processes and technologies that combine to form an equilibrium essential to mitigating data risk.

Finally, we interview Angela Power, our Director of the Privacy Centre of Excellence at Bell, about the changing landscape of privacy-related data and how organizations can better manage this high-profile issue.

As always, we welcome your feedback on the tools and resources provided and on any other aspect of our services.

Best regards,

Stéphane Boisvert

President, Bell Enterprise