Data is one of the most important assets you will have in your business or organization. It makes the entire business work, from marketing, sales to customer service. How can you make your business plan if you don’t have any relevant data or how can you make any changes in the business if you don’t have data suggesting that change? How can you create an advertising plan if you don’t have data informing you what your customer wants?

This is why before making any decision business owners or decision-makers need to collect all the relevant data and use it to create the best possible solution for the company. Even though you will hear about some business leaders that are making decisions based on the hunch, most of the businesses can’t afford to take that kind of unnecessary risk and they will base their decision on collected data.

The data that helps companies to make this kind of decision is being created every time we as users use our devices. And now, we use our devices more than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted our behavior, especially when it comes to our online presence. Not only did it force us into lockdowns and forced us to limit our social interactions, but it also introduced working and schooling from home into our “new normal”. As seen on the Canadian Internet Use Survey, 75% of Canadians 15 years of age and older have engaged in various Internet-related activities more often since the pandemic started and almost half (48%) of Canadians reported performing at least one of various Internet-related activities for the first time during the pandemic. The numbers wouldn’t be much different in other countries too.

Have you wondered how much data we create every day with our growing usage of the Internet? TechJury’s estimate stands at 1.145 trillion MB per day. That doesn’t mean all of this data is useful and that is where data enrichment comes in handy.

What is Data Enrichment?

Data enrichment as described by SEON is a process that takes raw data points and merges them with similar data points in a larger database. That database can be internal or maintained by a third-party service. Most companies use data enrichment to know more about a customer based on one piece of information, like an email address or phone number. What this means is that the data is collected from different sources and used to “enrich” the original data.

For example, you can have a customer’s email address, but that doesn’t help you to know who that customer is, how can you help them and what can you offer them. By adding behavioral, demographic, or geographic data you can create a complete user profile and make sure you provide the best service. This makes the data more useful as it adds value to it and now that data can be used to identify the areas of interest for that customer or ensure advertisements and messaging are relatable to the customer or even to improve the cyber security of the business or the organization.

How data enrichment can help businesses secure themselves better

While most businesses already use data enrichment, they mostly use it for targeted marketing and sales purposes. Meanwhile, they are completely overlooking the benefits data enrichment can bring them when it comes to cybersecurity. And we need cybersecurity now more than ever. As the world is shifting its approach more towards digitalization, cyberattacks have become a common occurrence according to ICOholder. If businesses or organizations start using data enrichment in the fight against cyber-attacks they can stop them before they cause any serious damage.

Used correctly it can be an amazing tool to fight against cyber frauds as it can stop attacks in the root before they cause any damage to the customer and business. As mentioned in IBM’s research, the average time to detect and contain a data breach was 287 days with the cost of $4.87 million. Can you imagine how much more cost-effective would it be to stop the attacks before they even happen? Data enrichment can do this because while collecting details about customers from different sources it is creating that users’ unique browser fingerprint. By doing this, it can recognize when something is different with the fingerprint and confirm it with the user. It can also compare users’ IP or email addresses with the databases to see if it was involved with any previous data breaches or if on any spam blacklists.

You need to be aware that data enrichment can’t be done only once, because customer data is constantly changing. You need to make sure you use data enrichment constantly to make sure your data is up to date and that your users and business are protected against cyber threats.