This blog focuses on data warehouses and discusses the threats they potentially expose your data too.
What is a Data Warehouse?
A data warehouse is a centralised store for the data collected by a company from consumers. Data is collected on a huge scale and in most cases it will end up in a data warehouse, the data is then kept and stored until it can be ether utilised or sold.
What are the problems with this?
One huge problem connected to storing data on a mass scale is that it becomes very vulnerable to a cyber attack leaving personal data exposed. This might sound like a load of nonsense but time and time again there are reports of companies having their systems hacked and the information is taken, sold on or held as ransom directly threatening the security of our everyday web and mobile communications.
Recently 157,000 Talk Talk customers had personal data stolen from the Talk Talk system this ranged from minor information right through to 15,656 customers whose bank details were taken. Clearly this is a negative for letting someone else hold data that is anything other than a directly necessary to the company and this example isn’t a one-off.
If interested in reading about more cases of mass data being hacked click on either of the examples bellow
Is it all negative?
Its not all bad, data warehouses do play an important role in many businesses and the current and historical data they store is used for creating beneficial analytical reports. The question still needs to be asked if all the data collected is truly necessary to the company holding it and if not, whether they should be permitted to store it. For the moment the best way to avoid any of your information being stolen is to try and avoid signing up for anything that isn’t truly necessary online and to keep your usage to a minimum but apart from that there is very little you can do. Companies are now so fixated with collecting data from you that there is little chance of this trend in marketing slowing down.
To see a chart of the biggest data hacks of recent years click here
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