Data Analytics

What is Cybersecurity and Why is it Important

Data and analytics (D&A) refers to the ways organizations manage data to support all its uses, and analyze data to improve decisions, business processes and outcomes, such as discovering new business risks, challenges and opportunities.

In recent years, headlines about cybersecurity have become increasingly common. Thieves steal customer social security numbers from corporations’ computer systems. Unscrupulous hackers grab passwords and personal information from social media sites or pluck company secrets from the cloud. For companies of all sizes, keeping information safe is a growing concern.

What is the role of data and analytics in business?

The role of data and analytics is to equip businesses, their employees and leaders to make better decisions and improve decision outcomes. This applies to all types of decisions, including macro, micro, real-time, cyclical, strategic, tactical and operational. At the same time, D&A can unearth new questions, as well as innovative solutions and opportunities that business leaders had not yet considered.

Progressive organizations use data in many ways and must often rely on data from outside their boundary of control for making smarter business decisions.

Data and analytics is also a catalyst for digital transformation as it enables faster, more accurate and more relevant decisions in complex and fast-changing business contexts.

Both individuals and organizational teams make decisions, for example, when a person considers whether to buy a product or service, or when a business function determines how best to serve a client or citizen.

Data-driven decision making means using data to work out how to improve decision making processes. This leads to the idea of a decision model, which can include prescriptive analytical techniques that generate outputs that specify which actions to take. Other analytical models are descriptive, diagnostic or predictive (also see “What are core analytics techniques?”). Each can help with specific kinds of decisions.

Notably, decisions drive action but may equally determine when not to act.

Progressive organizations are infusing data and analytics into business strategy and digital transformation by creating a vision of a data-driven enterprise, quantifying and communicating business outcomes, and fostering data-fueled business changes. (Also see “How do you create a data and analytics strategy?”)