What happens when data becomes scary? Which data management incidents keep you awake at night? Which data breaches will make you get goosebumps?
Halloween is just around the corner, so it is time for some scary… data horror stories!
We all know that data loss can have a devastating impact, enough to make a grown man cry, and for businesses with the amount of data involved the impact is usually much larger than the loss of personal data. For small companies, data loss can even threaten the survival of the entire business. Many companies have commercially sensitive data, such as information about their customers, products, or processes. If lost and not backed up, it can have a devastating impact on both the company and customers. A huge data loss can set the company back several years in the development process.
One of the scariest data horror stories, and unfortunately very common, is data breaches. This may be the result of a hacker attack, or businesses leaving their data without sufficient protection, or sometimes poor passwords from users.
No matter how many best practices are followed, poor quality data will lead to poor quality information and bad visualisations. Data quality issues can come from several sources, such as typing mistakes and manual input errors, duplication, rows missing or returning as null, errors in business systems, etc. A famous data quality horror story was from NASA, due to an inconsistency with the data for their Mars orbiter.
Data visualisation can also be a nightmare! The process of taking data and information into a visual context, which could include different types of graphs, charts, maps and that way help users detect patterns faster allowing them to make quick and better decisions. A poorly designed graph can lead users to incorrect conclusions, quickly become a horror story in itself, even if the data quality is relatively good. Common mistakes include choosing the wrong type of visualisation for the data or trying to display too much information at once, or using inconsistent scales.
These are some of data horror stories, but out there are much more. Know how to avoid them and make sure you don’t join the list of victims this Halloween.
And remember...
If there's somethin' strange in your data management.
Who you gonna call?
If there's somethin' weird with your data and it doesn't look good.
Who you gonna call?
Call us, we can help boost your business!