“Farsightedness is a common problem. You can see distant objects clearly, but objects nearby may be blurry.” This was the opening to a financial newsletter from Guild Investment Management that I received recently and it struck a cord for our industry as well.

To their detriment most businesses have been largely blind to their own critical data in terms of understanding and controlling it - even as they watch data exposures occur on a daily basis at other organizations and sometimes within their own companies.

We’ve all heard about, and in many ways have become numb to the results of poor data controls, including data breaches, profit loss, loss of reputation, etc. As common as data loss has become, very few organizations have made the necessary investments (in time or money) to correct their own shortcomings and address the challenges around data security. The result is continued blurry vision when it comes to enterprise data security.

What if we began looking at the issue of controlling data through a new lens? As opposed to just focusing in on the resulting problems of poor data security, what if the business executives and stakeholders realized that better security is better for the bottom-line?

Think about this - the United States is the world’s largest economy and the most vulnerable to data loss. In fact, the US leads the world in data loss (maybe because we collectively have the most valuable data in the world). The impact to the bottom-line is $156 billion, according to The Leaking Vault 2011 Six-Years of Data Breaches, and that is a conservative estimate. (Please note, this number includes 34 other countries that experienced data breaches however biggest impact to bottom-line was in the US).

It’s obvious then, that the better you protect data; the more your data is worth. The sooner we correct the blurry vision we have when viewing our own data, the more clearly we will see benefits positively impacting our bottom line.

Why do you think companies have such poor vision into their own data? And what are you doing to correct it at your organization?