There are many, many important aspects of running a business that you as a business owner have to know about, and each one is a priority to understand and, very often, implement. Yet your data and how you monitor it might not make it to the top of your to-do list very often when there’s so much more to do, and when it probably doesn’t seem all that crucial to the running of your business. 

Of course, if it wasn’t important we wouldn’t be mentioning it, let alone writing an entire blog post about it, so that should give you a clue that monitoring your data is probably more important than you’ve realized. If you’re not sure or want to know more so you can set up some processes to capture your data properly, keep reading; here are some of the reasons how and why you need to effectively monitor data in your business. 

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Why Is Data Monitoring Important? 

Before we can look at how you can monitor your data properly, it’s well worth thinking about why you might want to – it’s a potentially big job (although there are some great tools to help you, as we’ll see), and understanding what it can do for your business could be the motivation you need to get on with actually doing it. 

For one thing – and it’s an important thing – when you monitor your data, you’ll be able to protect sensitive information, and that’s vital to any business. Businesses handle various types of sensitive data, including personal customer details, financial information, and information about your business (including your banking details, for example), and any kind of break or unauthorized access can lead to some massive problems like financial losses and legal issues. When you’re able to effectively monitor your data, you’ll be able to spot any potential threats before they go too far and your data is stolen.

Something else that data monitoring can do is ensure you’re being entirely compliant with all the data protection regulations – which, by the way, is a legal requirement. There are laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), not to mention the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as well as others, and they all have plenty of stringent protection measures as part of their rules – measures you need to have in place if you don’t want to run the risk of fines and legal penalties. If you monitor your data, you can stay compliant by ensuring you’re doing the right thing when it comes to how you handle your data. 

Plus, data is absolutely crucial when it comes to decision-making, which is something all business owners have to do. When you monitor your data, you can make sure your business is being accurate, and that you’ve got all the information you need to make good decisions – trying to make decisions without having all the information means you can’t possibly get to a proper outcome, and it could be that you’re using the wrong data, which means the wrong result. Better insights mean better decisions – it just makes sense. 

How To Monitor Data 

Now you know why it’s so important to monitor data, it’s crucial to know how to go about it – if you don’t know how to do that, all the useful things you can do with the information will go to waste, and you won’t get the positive results you need to keep your business running in a successful way. 

The first thing to think about is real-time monitoring tools, which are vital if you want to be able to detect and respond to possible data problems when they’re happening (rather than having to deal with the fallout, when it’s already happened and it’s too late to make any changes). These tools can give you continuous insights into everything to do with your data collection, meaning that you can spot anomalies, including unauthorized access, as soon as possible, which we know means you’ve got a much better chance of dealing with them without too much disruption. 

You’ll also want to carry out regular data audits because that’s a great way to ensure data accuracy and security – and don’t worry, they’re not as daunting as they might sound. In fact, they’re pretty easy, although don’t let that fool you either because they’re still important and still necessary. All you need to do is systematically review all your data, access logs, and any security controls you might have to check in case you see any problems like entries that shouldn’t be there (or should be there, but aren’t), and so on. When you carry out regular audits, you can help ensure nothing is wrong, and spot problems before they become too much of an issue, and hopefully save your business a lot of time and money in the process. 

Then there’s the use of DSPM platforms to think about. A DSPM platform (which stands for data security posture management), is a fantastic solution that’s specifically designed to manage and secure a business’s data – among plenty of other things well. Basically, DPSM platforms give you a central way to take care of everything, including your data monitoring, and they can therefore give you a full company view of everything that’s happening. You should be able to see at a glance if all is well – or otherwise – so it can make those audits we mentioned above a lot easier, and ensure you get them done even if you’re really busy, as most business owners will be.  

Tools are really useful, and they’re well worth investing in and learning as much about as possible so you can make sure you’re using them in the right way, but you can’t do it all alone, and if you’ve got a team of employees, they’ll need to learn the same things you do. In that way, you can be sure everyone understands how to monitor data and what they need to do if there’s a problem. On top of that, the truth is that human error is a big issue, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why there might be a data breach in your business. All in all, it’s clear that regular training and using special awareness programs can be a really great idea – you’ll be able to educate your employees (and yourself – don’t forget you’ll always be learning as a business owner, or at least you should be) about how to keep data safe, what the potential threats are, and why it’s so important to follow all the rules. The more informed your employees are, the more likely they are to do the right thing, make fewer mistakes, and prevent more security incidents, and in the end, that’s going to be very positive for your business. 

But if human error is such a problem, will training really make it go away? Yes and no. Training is vital, and it will definitely minimize the issue, but people can still make mistakes, no matter how well-trained they are and how much experience they have, which is why it could also be a good idea to have access controls in place – just to be on the safe side. Access controls mean you can monitor exactly who has access to what, meaning that only employees who need to access certain sensitive pieces of data can – everyone else won’t have access, which limits the number of mistakes that could be made. Once you’ve got access controls in place, it’s a good idea to constantly check on them and make sure they’re still right, and if you can do that, you’ll have a strong line of defense against data breaches.