It’s National Data Privacy Day. Do you know if your data is safe?

Data Privacy Day is an international effort to create awareness about the importance of respecting privacy, safeguarding data and enabling trust. This year’s observance spotlights the value of information.

OpenText’s Mark Barrenechea

More than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day, said Mark Barrenechea, OpenText‘s CEO. This pace will only continue to accelerate as automated cars, sensors, drones and IoT introduce new formats at a rapid-fire pace, he said.

“The nature of the data has changed, as today’s data goes well beyond what you can find in the phone book of a decade ago,” he said. “In this digital era, your modern data now includes your behaviors (friends list, what you read, pictures, a recording of all your phone calls, and so on). But what is the real difference when a bad actor steals 135 million people’s data from a credit aggregator or when a social media company sells 85 million people’s data to a political consulting firm? The actors are different, but the consumer impact is the same. Trust is broken. Whether it be governments, individuals or businesses, when trusted with data, it is job No. 1 to defend and protect that which is entrusted. This trust transcends products or services.”

David Mason, SiteLock‘s manager of channel account management, said companies need to realize that consumers are becoming more aware and educated about cybersecurity. As a result, businesses need to be more aggressive and diligent about their cybersecurity strategies knowing that consumers are paying closer attention.

SiteLock’s David Mason

As cybersecurity awareness grows and the threat landscape continues to change, new products, tools and best practices have become available to help business better protect themselves, Mason said.

“Additionally, I believe that this is also driving more engineers and developers to reevaluate their security practices and build their systems around a security first focus,” he said.

Policies like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are making a difference, Mason said. They are forcing accountability and driving public awareness around the importance of not only strong data protection, but cybersecurity in general, he said.

“In the coming year, I think we will see these regulations expand outside of Europe,” he said. “Additionally, I think they will broaden in scope beyond data protection into enforcing proactive cybersecurity, such as website security. It’s critical that we see regulations and legislation around what business should be doing to prevent a breach from happening in the first place.”