Trust is won in drips but lost in buckets Intel managing director A/NZ, Kate Burleigh says
The economy and innovation agenda is under serious threat from a new enemy according to Intel managing director A/NZ, Kate Burleigh, and that enemy is data privacy.
Burleigh used part of her keynote address at the Next Big Thing Summit in Melbourne to tackle an issue that until recently had been the purview of IT security professionals, but she told the audience that the rapid rate of product development was a triumph that we could not afford to take for granted.
“Once upon a time you could take three to six years to get a product to market, now people are thinking in terms of weeks and months,” she said.
“That is the expectation because the time to market equation has changed through the proliferation of digital technologies and the expectation that something will be always on and always available.
“It is so different from a few years ago let alone 10 to 15 years ago.
However, Burleigh stressed that despite this rapid reduction in time to market for many products, there were still serious inhibitors to high-speed product development, chief among which was data security.
“Data is a great opportunity, but how we collect it and act responsibly with that data is one of the things that is slowing companies down because they are unsure how to navigate around these issues.
“The world will always be influenced by macroeconomic effects that can blindside us but we need to be ready to adjust and change with those effects as they happen.
She said data is spoken about as gold, rivers of gold and she was completely on board with that but how we treat that data and how we protect people’s privacy is absolutely critical to any business's value proposition.
“One of the things we say at Intel is trust is won in drips but lost in buckets.
“Think of how long it takes for us to build our brand and our trust and how quickly one data breach can unravel that trust and do irreparable damage to a brand."
Burleigh went on to say that data piracy was a $US1 trillion dollar industry, twice the value of the global illicit drug market and this presented a clear and present danger to business and consumers alike.
“We know from talking to other companies that when breaches occur, it can often take three to six months for those breaches to be detected and a further three to six months to repair that breach, that is way too slow,” he said.
The Intel boss hastened to add that unless this issue was addressed on a grand scale by the wider economic community, we would begin to see the great technological advancements made in recent years effect business and consumers negatively with drastic consequences.
Chris Player travelled to The Next Big Thing Summit in Melbourne as a guest of Intel.
