Data and its analysis play a vital role in every business, allowing strategists to make informed decisions, compare strategies, and make critical decisions regarding where to spend resources. It helps you understand where your company has the most earning potential and how to tap into it, enabling you to track employee performance and make promotions and dismissals accordingly.
However, before you can start collecting and utilizing data for all these benefits, you must first have a robust data management system. This ensures your data is accessible to all employees, remains updated, and is always secure. Here are some ways you can effectively manage your data.
1. Standardizing Data
Regardless of your company’s size, you will collect data through multiple sources, each of a particular business operation. You will have data coming in from surveys, software, customer complaints, and web pages. This data will be coming monthly, weekly, or daily, depending on the size of your operations. Without proper care, this information will remain scrambled, making it difficult for the relevant employees to access it and draw out necessary conclusions.
Standardizing data helps avoid this issue. You use labels to divide your data into groups and further subsections to streamline the analysis process. You can create groups based on the department the data belongs to, such as finance or marketing, or you can have labels focus on the data source, for example, emails and forms. Choose a format that best aligns with your business goals and layout.
Manually standardizing data is nearly impossible due to its massive influx. Instead, we recommend you invest in a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)to standardize data entry.
It’s also advisable to use a report maker so you can compile different data sets.
2. Backing-Up Data
Your data is highly essential to your business’s success, and you must protect it against accidents by taking timely and comprehensive data backups. Here are two popular options:
- Cloud storage: Here, you store your data on an off-site server. It’s cost-effective since you do not have to invest in servers and can just buy the space you need. As your operations grow, you can purchase more.
- External hard drive: High-volume external hard drives face negligible risks from hackers, and you can easily store them in your office or a bank locker. However, they are expensive, and shifting new data is almost impossible.
3. Protecting Data
Despite having backups, you do not want your sensitive data to fall into the hands of hackers who can sell it on the dark web and let all your hard work go to waste. You must integrate data protection measures into your technological environment.
One measure is investing in a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). The program combines multiple security tools into one application. It monitors, detects, and fights against security threats and vulnerabilities within your cloud. It also removes cloud misconfigurations to safeguard your data.
You must also encrypt your data files to provide an extra layer of protection between you and the hacker. Consider including a two-step verification where your employees must provide two sets of information to access the data. For example, they must enter a password with a code sent to their mobiles.
Endnote
Data is the backbone of your company. Through it, you can extract vital information and trends that shape your company’s operations and success. For this to happen, you must first ensure proper data management.
There are multiple steps in managing data effectively, the most significant being standardizing, backing up, and protecting the data. These ensure your data is well kept, will not be lost, and remains safe from hackers.
