According to the “Cisco 2018 Privacy Maturity Benchmark Study”, 65% of businesses experience sales delays due to data privacy issues. With the rise in data breaches, data privacy is a major concern for any business, mainly while outsourcing data entry and other documentation tasks. To ensure data security, most businesses are now considering safe technology options. The data from Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Security Survey shows that more than half of global businesses have adopted secure file-sharing and collaboration technologies, with a further 19% planning to do so in the next 12 months.
The Cisco 2018 Report points out that customer data privacy issues have resulted in an average delay time of two months (7.8 weeks). It also highlights the fact that privacy-mature businesses that have stronger security protections tend to experience 80% shorter sales delays. Sales delays can often lead to lost revenue. This survey involved 3600 security professionals in 25 countries across all major industries.
Key findings in the report that suggest strong privacy protections could mean a stronger business include the following.
- Sales delays varied significantly by the organizational model adopted for the privacy resources. A hybrid model, which has a mix of centralized and decentralized privacy resources, had shorter delays (4.6 weeks), compared to models with fully centralized (9.8 weeks) or decentralized resources (7.1 weeks).
- The longest delays by country occurred in Latin America (15.4 weeks), Mexico (13.0 weeks), and Japan (12.1 weeks), and the shortest delays were reported in China (2.8 weeks) and Russia (3.3 weeks).
- By industry, companies in the government and healthcare sectors showed highest delays and shortest average delays were seen in the utilities and pharmaceuticals sector.
- 74% of privacy-immature companies experienced a cyber loss of over $500,000 last year, compared to only 39% of privacy-mature companies.
Cisco report also provides certain recommendations to minimize the delays, such as ensuring timely access of information to salespeople that addresses common customer privacy concerns, encouraging teams to quickly investigate customer issues as they arise and working with engineering and product development to ensure that privacy is built in from the beginning. It is critical for every organization to better understand the impact of data privacy on their sales cycle. Even while relying on document scanning companies to meet their digitization needs, businesses must make sure that the vendor they partner with follows standard file sharing and client data security policies.
