Tangible Business Benefits from Data Privacy Investments – Cisco Study

Need to convince stakeholders in your organization to make an investment in data privacy? Check out the Cisco 2019 Data Privacy Benchmark Study.

More than 3,200 global security and privacy professionals in 18 countries responded to the Cisco survey. Of the 3,259 respondents, here are the benefits of privacy investments that they identified:

– Enabling agility and innovation from having appropriate data controls – 42%
– Gaining competitive advantage versus other organizations – 41%
– Achieving operational efficiency from having data organized and catalogued – 41%
– Mitigating losses from data breaches – 39%
– Reducing any sales delays due to privacy concerns from customers/prospects – 37%
– Gaining appeal with investors – 36%
– None of the above – 3%

75% of respondents identified multiple business benefits of their privacy investments.

A couple highlights from the study:

“Organizations that maximize the value of their data in appropriate ways can benefit greatly by building trust with customers and using well-protected and curated data to enhance the customer experience and drive greater value for all stakeholders.”

“[P]rivacy maturity has become an important competitive advantage for many companies. Organizations should work to maximize the business benefits of their privacy investments, which may go beyond the requirements of any particular privacy regulation.”

Privacy Delaying Sales Cycles

Privacy concerns are delaying sales cycles – 87 percent of companies are experiencing delays, up from 66 percent last year. However, organizations that invested in data privacy experienced shorter delays in selling to existing customers: 3.4 weeks vs. 5.4 weeks.

Of the 1,812 respondents, here are a few of the reasons for sales delays relating to privacy:

– Investigating specific/unusual requirements for the customer/prospect to establish their comfort with privacy practices – 49%
– Needs to learn more about our privacy policies or processes – 39%
– Redesign product/service to meet privacy requirements – 38%

GDPR Compliance Reducing/Mitigating Data Breaches

GDPR compliance also correlates with fewer data breaches costing more than $500,000. Only 37 percent of companies that said they are GDPR-ready experienced a data breach costing more than $500,000, while 64 percent of other companies experienced a data breach over that amount. The results showed not only that GDPR-ready companies had fewer data breaches. When they did experience a breach, there were fewer records involved and less system downtime.

Other Interesting Privacy Data

59 percent of respondents reported they are in substantial compliance (meeting all or most requirements). 29 percent expect to be prepared within a year. 9 percent will be over a year. Respondents were asked to identify the most significant challenges of GDPR. The top response was meeting data security requirements. A few others from the top nine (along with the percentage of respondents):

– Meeting data subject access requests – 34%
– Cataloging and inventorying our data – 31%
– Vendor management – 28%

To read more about the business benefits identified, click here PDF).

More Resources:

Check out the materials Clarip has gathered on the CCPA and contact us to see a demo of the Clarip privacy management platform used by Fortune 500 clients.