Businesses large and small depend on access to information in order to make smarter, data-driven decisions. And much of that data is personal, sensitive, or confidential. So how can you balance this demand for big data with the need to protect the individuals whom this data describes? When it comes to personally identifiable information (PII), there are multiple very good reasons why you should keep it securely under lock and key.

Businesses of all sizes and entire industries rely on analyzing personal data to beat their competitors and better serve their customers. For example, information from your CRM (customer relationship management) software can help you understand how to convert more leads in a particular area or from a specific demographic.

Data breaches can happen to any company, regardless of size or technical resources. In April 2021, Facebook’s reputation took a massive hit when a data breach impacted more than half a billion users. The worst kind of data breach involves personally identifiable information (PII). PII is essentially any data that contains sensitive details about real people, such as customers and employees.

Business intelligence (BI) tools have been a shot in the arm of the enterprise. Teams can create their own visualizations and enjoy self-service analytics, without needing IT to compile reports or wrangle big data. But, of course, there’s a catch. BI tools expose data to a wider range of people, which means there are new issues of BI security (BISEC) and privacy to think about, especially in the age of GDPR. Here’s what you need to know.

When you’re working with personally identifiable information (PII), you may have to follow data privacy laws that govern how you must handle it. If the PII comes from an educational institution, that law is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, also known as FERPA.

Companies deal with high volumes of data every day. In fact, 51% of businesses realize a positive difference in their bottom line by using their business intelligence (BI) to predict customer trends. According to one source, the BI market may reach close to $30 billion before the end of 2022. With so much money going into data management and so much resulting from it, the need for effective cybersecurity measures continues to grow by the day.

Healthcare information is perhaps the most important data in our lives. Your health records can contain your medical history, results of tests and scans, and details of current health insurance. This data is a special class of personally identifiable information, and HIPAA is the law that protects it.

Business intelligence (BI) software, such as Microsoft Power Bi, allows organizations to leverage big data and make better business decisions. Select Hub reports that 48 percent of companies place high or critical importance on these solutions. However, BI tools introduce a level of security risk that businesses must address.

Extract, Load, Transform, or ELT, is a process that extracts data from the source, loads it directly into a data warehouse or data lake, and then transforms it to make it available for business intelligence tools. It supports all data types, from raw to structured. ELT is a popular way to ingest large volumes of raw data quickly, but it brings many security concerns with it.