Effectively managing your digital risks

Today’s corporations and agencies are inundated with large volumes of data. With increasing pressure to drive productivity and improve service delivery, we depend on real time analytics to make smarter decisions.

Analysing and understanding data is becoming a core skill for an unprecedented number of professions. Best practice data management offers enormous promises. The Federal Government alone is sitting on $16 billion per year of unrealised value from data investment and the use of Government data in new enterprises can help to boost our economy. Positive use of data can transform Government in service provision, regulation, policy, and achieve better outcomes for Australian citizens and industry.

Cloud computing has been increasingly popular for companies as people are able to use Internet services across devices as long as they are connected. It is predicted that by end of 2015, end user spending on cloud services can go up to $180 billion.

A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics survey released in July this year showed 60% of companies stated there were no factors which prevented the use of paid cloud computing. Of the companies that chose not to adopt paid cloud computing services, the top five reasons were: 

From the survey, 16% of the respondents expressed that the main reason for not adopting cloud services is due to the risk of a security breach. According to IBM Security Services, companies are attacked 16, 856 times a year on average and many of those attacks result in a quantifiable data breach. The study found that that average consolidated total cost of a data breach is $3.8 million, which is a 23% since 2013. 

In this constantly evolving ICT landscape, organisations are faced with many unique challenges. Minimising the exposure to cyber risk is an area most organisations are focussing on. It is crucial for companies to be well prepared for an incident and to implement effective frameworks in place to effectively respond in the event of a breach.

Despite cyber risks, there are many benefits of whole-of-government data analytics in tackling complex social challenges and achieve positive social outcomes.

Attend Akolade’s upcoming Australian Government Data Summit in March 2016 in Canberra to discover best practice examples of approaches to Government data security and find the most innovative, useful and promising platforms developed using government data.

Being brought up in a typical Chinese family in Australia, Vivian takes pride as an ABC (Australia-born Chinese) where she happily embraces both the Chinese and Australian cultures. 

In high school, Vivian wanted to become a fashion designer, however she has developed a passion for running events after working backstage for multiple live shows. Prior to starting at Akolade, Vivian worked 4 years in the wine industry and she misses the wine tasting sessions and openly drinking on the job. As the Marketing Coordinator, Vivian enjoys using her creativity to design unique and fun campaigns for each event. In her spare time, Vivian loves to spend time with her two adorable cat and dog.