Cyber Security
The importance of valuing data
T By Sarah James
his article gives an overview of the importance of data, what happens when we use data incorrectly and discusses how protecting your data can make a difference. organisation. What happens when we use data incorrectly and how can protecting your data make a difference? This article gives an overview of the importance of data.
Why does data matter? Can we measure how much data is worth? Can we measure how much someone cares about data? An idiom comes to mind “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure”, the data we throw away can be just as valuable in a world where data is the new oil (or not, depending on your perspective). What one person may think is worthless, may be cherished or exploited by another. Value is different for every person and every organisation. What you and your organisation values, has an impact on the security of your organisation. We protect what we value. In The Good Ones: Ten Crucial Qualities of High Character Employees, Bruce Weinstein identifies our core values for individuals as: gratitude, honesty, care, presence, patience, accountability, loyalty, humility and courage. We all weight these differently depending on who we are and what we are doing. A lapse in concentration can change the way in which an action is interpreted, being aware of doing the right thing at all times is necessary and the value of the outcome will certainly increase with the thought that has been applied. Whilst values are hard to measure quantitatively with data, it is important to think about values in relation to people and consider how security may be affected. The values of an organisation can be considered as part of a security and data strategy to protect its most
52 | Australian Cyber Security Magazine
valued data. We all value data differently, and data makes an impact to us and the work we do in many ways. How we think, act and deliver affects how we use data in order to prove or disprove hypotheses. We can create a bias in both our data selection and our data analysis and potentially, bias the results. This can affect the way a business transverses the highs and lows of a volatile environment. We all favour a certain type of data. My own preference is locational or spatial data. Some may prefer financial, others performance data, some may even like to see the production data. We can correct bias if we become aware of them. Every data scientist works with data in a unique and subtle way. Not everyone values data in the same way as others. Data scientists use data every day and sometimes they need to stop and remove their lenses that can create bias, to be open minded to new datasets and methodologies, and provide the best data insights that we can find. Data Scientists work with subject matter experts to validate the data and to help AI to learn to classify and disseminate the data quickly and effectively. Decisions that are made wisely can have a greater impact; changing processes rapidly, deploying solutions iteratively and releasing value sooner for a business. Data scientists are integral to the analysis and understanding of data, but they are far from the only people affected. People in different roles in an organisation are likely to value data differently. How a decision maker e.g. the C-Suite would value data and be very different to a Data Scientist. The insights in the data depend on the dataset that we select. Each role perspective alters the risk profile that is associated with the data. The knowledge of others is key to different roles across the organisation. This is because the perceived risk changes as the dataset and the role of the person who uses that data changes.
