In this post, we will explore all of the different places where a modern marketing and sales workflow tends to store data about a prospect, and also common places for customer data to reside as a result of daily operations. The purpose of discovery here is to illustrate the vast ecosystem which develops -- quite organically -- over time as companies grow.
Understanding this growth of systems and the resulting data proliferation is essential to understand why privacy and data protection have become such a hot topic, to say the least.
Web Analytics
When you embed 3rd party tags into your site, you are giving those companies the ability to collect data about your visitors. Some of that data they share with you. Much of that data they don't share, and instead use it to improve their products and services. Two notable companies in this space are Google and Adobe.
Google's advertising empire is supplemented with tons of user data collected over the years by their free Analytics service and other technologies. This data is used to measure ad effectiveness and improve their service offerings.
Adobe is a latecomer to direct advertising services with their Advertising Cloud service. They also have a co-op service where companies can opt in to anonymous sharing of user data to better resolve identities for all company members.
Server Logs
Whenever a web browser requests a page from a server, that request is recorded in the server log. That record contains a lot of information about the device from whence the request originated. That's your phone, your laptop, or your watch. It can also send along any existing cookies which have been set for that particular site. Quite a lot of data in an http request, actually.
CRMs
Customer relationship management systems like Salesforce are designed to collect profile and event data about your prospects. They are obvious stores of this type of information, used in the service of your sales efforts.
AdTech Systems
There is a ton of your customer's information being collected through their interaction on your site by your advertising vendor partners. There isn't much you can do about that, nor do you have direct access to that data, but by extension you do have responsibility for it. This data is used to facilitate remarketing, profiling, conversion tracking and identity resolution
Email/Marketing Automation Systems
These systems are similar to CRMs but serve a pre-sales function like email and SMS outreach to spur engagement. They run primarily on behavioral data and scoring models. Results of scoring models are also personal data, having been derived from traits and behaviors of a person. That's worth making note of. If you assign a score to someone, that's their data, too.
Cloud Infrastructure Systems
Many data ecosystems use cloud services to move, retain, or transform data. Vast amounts of personal data are in these systems.
Spreadsheets
The dirty little secret of many companies is the lack of policy enforcement around data protection when it comes to employee files on the network. It's a no-man's-land of abandoned customer lists full of PII out there, backed up in triplicate by IT systems which do not discriminate between a graphic design file and a file full of email addresses.
FTP Servers
A legacy method for data transfer, this is still very much in common use today. Files full of user data are transferred between systems through FTP. Often those files are left on the transfer server just in case something goes wrong in the scheduled process, resulting in huge archives of user data that is largely unaccounted for in an audit. Plus, they are web-accessible locations with varying levels of security, creating a liability for the companies which rely on them.
Databases
Classic stores of information in relational SQL databases, Microsoft Access, IBM AS400s, Oracle and SAS systems. When we think data, we think databases.
Agencies
No surprise (I hope) that most agencies you employ are using all of the above to collect and analyze personal data for your customers on your behalf. Agencies operate as extensions of your core business only outside of any strict data governance oversight. If you are using agencies, they are undoubtedly using your prospects' data for analysis and performance reporting. So they're retaining it for that purpose. Make sure to audit them once in a while.
Can you think of any other places data lives? Contact us and share your stories!