Research finds that business and consumer attitudes towards data use have shifted during the course of the pandemic
Splunk, provider of the Data-to-Everything Platform, announced new research in collaboration with Censuswide into European business and consumer attitudes towards data during the pandemic(COVID).
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“The impact of the global pandemic on the economy has made it clear to businesses that they need to embrace the Data Age to survive(Splunk)”
Key findings show that businesses have been spurred on to embrace the Data Age – while consumers have become more cautious, with raised expectations about how their data is handled:
- The majority of businesses believe COVID has accelerated the use of data in operations
- Confidence in IT infrastructure resilience has fallen sharply
- Consumers continue to raise their expectations for how businesses handle their data
The Data Age is here
Over three-quarters of businesses in France (79%) and the UK (77%) believe that COVID has accelerated the way they use data in their operations. There is further momentum behind this trend in Germany (64%) and the Netherlands (61%). Those surveyed also said the uptick in usage will help ensure future success with a majority of UK businesses (80%) saying it will help drive innovation with some improvement (82% in France, 68% in Germany and 80% in the Netherlands). On average, the vast majority of European businesses surveyed (90%) said visualising real-time data has helped them to make better decisions.
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“The impact of the global pandemic on the economy has made it clear to businesses that they need to embrace the Data Age to survive,” said Frederik Maris, vice president of EMEA, Splunk. “Developing a data strategy carefully tied to business objectives can improve the quality of decision making within an organization. This cannot only improve short-term performance but help differentiate a business from its competitors by allowing for a culture of innovation to develop based on data. However, this cannot be done in isolation. Businesses need to keep consumers and their data concerns front of mind if they are to succeed in the Data Age.”
Before the pandemic, responsibility for managing and utilising data was typically seen as the domain of the IT function – whether to combat security threats or avoid downtime – but it is now being viewed as a strategic company asset for planning and decision making. Three-quarters of European businesses said it was being used for more regular monitoring of performance metrics within the business (73%) and to examine customer data more closely (69%), while a similar number (72%) said it was now helping to plot trends in order to inform new business developments.