Reaffirming Cisco’s Commitment to Secure Data on Global Data Privacy Day

Data fuels today’s economy. It’s at the center of how companies develop strategies, execute plans, make decisions, and manage business. From demographics to personal preferences, data allows companies to personalize and tailor their products, services, and experiences, and understand customer needs.

Protecting the privacy of customer data is more important than ever. Today, customers pay close attention to how vendors and trusted advisors deal with their data, and in fact, they are inclined to put the brakes on sales cycles if they sense their vendors and business partners lack solid privacy processes. On the flip side, Cisco’s 2018 Privacy Maturity Benchmark Study found that companies mature in their privacy practices experience 80 percent shorter sales delays due to customer data privacy concerns than companies with less mature privacy practices. That impacts the bottom line. The study also tells us that customers do not just want a world-class experience, they want the most SECURE world-class experience they can get.

January 28 marks Global Data Privacy Day, an annual international effort to create awareness about the importance of respecting privacy, safeguarding data, and enabling trust. Through people, process, policies and technology, Cisco continues to build strong data privacy practices into our culture. By focusing on data privacy, we more effectively manage risk, move faster, and increase the value of business data for our customers.

To help celebrate Global Data Privacy Day and help highlight Cisco’s diligent focus on privacy, you should check out the following resources (available January 25):

Video featuring Michelle Dennedy, Cisco’s Chief Privacy Officer, as she discusses Cisco’s Privacy and Data Maps

Cisco’s Data Maps, which help you learn how data flows through Cisco’s products and services

Cisco’s updated Privacy Benchmarking Study

I asked Judy Barron, Director of our Cisco Customer Experience Data Protection and Privacy team, to highlight Cisco’s Data Protection program.

Global Data Privacy Day helps raise awareness about online privacy and keeping personal information secure. This gives us an opportunity to share some best practices, renew our pledge to work tirelessly to keep private and safe the personal information we gather from customers, employees, and vendors. It also helps us show how we are doing our part to help our customers provide the same assurances to their customers.

As a part of our focus on protecting customer data and complying with all applicable data protection regulations, such as GDPR, Cisco embeds best practices and creates good data stewards by providing ongoing training on how to develop secure products, manage and treat data, and report data incidents swiftly and correctly.

Security and privacy are a priority and core to the products and services we provide, and they must be designed, built, and delivered with security and privacy in mind. We implement security across the entire product lifecycle by embedding security into product design, manufacturing and delivering products securely, driving a security-first mindset, and performing continuous innovation.

Cisco’s SD-WAN solution is a prime example. Cisco brings all these trustworthy elements together in this solution, which helps organizations secure modern applications no matter how they’re accessed. In Cisco’s SD-WAN, we fuse the best of our security software offerings with our software-defined wide area network tools. The SD-WAN solution also accelerates our customers’ ability to unlock the power of the cloud with less risk.

Being transparent and executing solid security and privacy practices builds trust, and trust surpasses everything in today’s business world. We’re working hard on all these fronts for our customers. Visit our trust.cisco.com site to learn how.