The growing appetite to invest in a data-hungry world

Businesses are only as good as the data they have at their disposal. Data has created new business models, new ways of working, and new competitive advantages. It’s enabled new agile upstarts to shake up established industries, and it’s seeing customers take the products and services that rely on this critical data for granted. They’re expecting consistent quality of service at all times, and reputations are being built and destroyed in equal measure thanks to data and the way companies decide to manage it.

Meanwhile, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has famously given businesses more data headaches. Given its widespread promotion, there are few companies out there who are still unaware of the legislation. UK government statistics collected in the run up to the implementation of GDPR in February 2018, for instance, claimed 80% of businesses with more than 250 employees were aware of GDPR, with it falling to 39%-66% for small and medium-sized organisations.

However, assumptions do still linger that the potentially huge fines and reputational damage that could come from being found in breach of the legislation will never happen to them. Assumptions cannot afford to be checked at the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). As operations of all kinds become inc