What’s the Point of Analytics if You Can’t Access Them?

- Becca Bauer, Director of Marketing & PR

In the workplace, data has become the golden ticket for companies to drive sales and stay competitive. However, much of the focus has been on the development of analytics and using data insights gathered on your marketing, sales, customers, products, new leads and so on to grow market share. All of this sounds good – hey it’s basically free marketing advice generated from your own information - but while this focus serves marketing and finance purposes, this emphasis fails to address the fundamental need of how we actually access those insights.

Big amounts of data is nothing new. It has always existed. Granted, not in such quantities as we have today with all of our applications and collaborative sharing tools, but document management has been holding a large amount of data since the 80s and email storage has been “big” ever since the late 90s. The onset of nonstop data being produced from everything from web history, emails and documents to contracts and CRM systems continues to grow daily, even hourly, enabling organizations to access corporate knowledge that is more relevant and targeted than ever. And as we move forward, there is no foreseeable end because we as a digital society produce a massive amount of data constantly that needs to be housed somewhere.

One major issue many companies are having is that they are looking to Cloud vendors and deployments to store historic or archived data in their infrastructure, as opposed to in the company’s own data center, and this often means recent data or even just 12-months old data get archived. The problem with this is, once the data is stored, how are companies easily able to access this data to extract business value or analytical insight to help businesses remain competitive? This is a big need! After all, how are companies supposed to take a targeted approach to their data and see if patterns emerge that can better be applied to high-value business decision to increase their bottom line if it is all archived and not easily accessible?

Access to data is the critical function here. Add to the fact that securely accessing stored data is an increasing challenge for companies, as often the data they want to examine contains confidential data such as PII (Personal Identifiable Information) and PHI (Personal Health Information), and it’s difficult for companies to guarantee the security of this sensitive data accessed by users.

So, what is the solution to putting your analytics and insights to use?

This is where BOHH Labs can step in and help. Our Secure Storage as A Service (SSaaS) acts as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data store and enables total security on all your stored data. This is done without changing the data structure, while making certain data points visible only to those with the correct permissions. Whether this is in a database or a document, the BOHH SSaaS solution enables full use of data without the security or accessibility concerns.

Our solution uniquely offers database or specific field level security. All data that needs to be secured is removed from the source, encrypting it and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control over sensitive data such as PHI, PII or GDPR. If you know which data fields or rows contain sensitive data, companies can better protect these fields to ensure business compliance and enable data to be utilized by a wider audience to extract greater business value or insight, while still securing it and only providing access to those who have the correct privileges to see it.

As the enterprise market continues to become more digital and the amount of data we produce rapidly grows, it will be even more important that secure access to this data is simple. The ability to to manage your continually growing data and extracting more accurate results to deliver valuable analytics will be critical for businesses to stay competitive.