Everyone knows that data is the new currency for enterprises in the digital age. But how important is privacy around that data to the average customer?

To answer this question, Cisco Systems Inc. set out to study the return on investment for data privacy. The company just released a new report, called the “2020 Data Privacy Benchmark Study,” that revealed privacy is now an “attractive investment” even beyond compliance requirements.

Robert Waitman (pictured), director of the data valuation and privacy, security and trust organization at Cisco, noted that the company’s survey this was was based on 2,800 companies, 2,500 of which knew about privacy in their organizations. The results, he said: “The average organization spends $100 on privacy. They’re getting $270 back. It is a great investment.”

Waitman spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. They discussed the importance of data privacy, why the ROI is so strong and ways companies can gain trust through data privacy. (* Disclosure below.)

Simple, tangible data privacy communication

With companies such as Facebook Inc. taking the heat for serious data-privacy controversies, the importance of keeping data private has become increasingly more important, according to Waitman. A significant amount of people are starting to ask questions around their data, and companies are having to listen.

“There’s an active community — we’re calling them ‘privacy actives,'” Waitman said. “It’s a third of the population today who are standing up to say, ‘I now know that I have some control over how my data is used.’ Therefore, think about the companies and how they relate to that. Their customers are saying to them, ‘I’m not going to work with you, and I’m not going to do business with you, and I want to only work with companies who I know how the data is being used.'”

A third of the population has already made their stance around data privacy clear, but more are following, according to Waitman. An additional 30% of study respondents are moving to make changes concerning their data and the importance of privacy.

As more people move in this direction, businesses will need to offer tangible, simple ways to show their customers what is actually happening to their data in order to gain trust and transparency. This is something Cisco itself has been trying hard to do.

“We started creating and publishing these privacy data sheets — which were relatively streamlined, fairly short documents that you could go through and say, ‘OK, I understand where the data’s going,'” Waitman said. “We’ve taken that another step to make them now very visual. We tried to make them look like subway maps where you have sort of color-coded ways the data flows through the system.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live. (* Disclosure: Cisco sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE