DATA SUSTAINS AN ORGANIZATION’S business processes and enables it to deliver products and services. Stop the flow of data, and for many companies, business comes quickly to a halt. Data drives online ordering, delivery schedules, allocation of resources, production lines, warehouse management, supply chain, and much more. The economy is driven by data. Those who understand its value and have the ability to manage related risks will have a competitive advantage. If the loss of data lasts long enough, the viability of an organization to survive may come into question. Fortunately, most outages and data disruptions are short in duration. But even short outages and data disruptions can be costly. For example, Forbes magazine wrote about a 30-minute outage that Amazon incurred on August 19, 2013. Speculation was that Amazon lost $66,240 per minute during the outage. The problem has not improved even after several years. In September 2019, Yahoo! email was out for many parts of the world for several hours. In July 2019, an article in The Verge, titled “Internet Outages Are Getting More Serious,”¹ commented that outages are growing both more widespread and more substantial.

Data classification is a useful way to rank the value and importance of groups of data. The importance of the data and the type of value assigned varies by organization. The value may be monetary, because certain data may be key to driving revenue. The value may be regulatory, because certain data carries legal obligations. The type of data categories (known as classifications) may vary greatly depending on the organization’s need. Data classification creates a standardized way of assigning data (or groups of data) to a classification. These data classifications then drive how data is appropriately handled. These policies and techniques feed into a risk management approach that helps prevent disruption of services.

This chapter discusses data classification techniques used by the government and within the private sector. It discusses ways of classifying data. It also discusses risk management approaches that include quality assurance, quality control, and key measurements.

1. https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/7/4/20681733/facebook-outage-internet-myanmar-consequences