How Do You Put a Price on Security and Compliance? Part III – Increasing Revenue

This is the third in a four-part series of blogs on how we and our customers assess the business value of Protegrity solutions.

Enterprise executives who must approve expenditures for data security and governance have decision criteria that extend beyond product specs, as we noted in the opening blog in this series.

They look at the bigger picture, and measure success in business terms. Based on the experiences of our customers, we have created three categories of spending justifications: reducing cost, increasing revenue, and minimizing risk. This blog will explore the second category: increasing revenue.

The power of “yes”

The evidence that Protegrity can help increase revenue rests on two factors:

• Protegrity’s data-security and governance solutions allow security and compliance teams to more easily and frequently say “yes” to legitimate requests from authorized users for access to sensitive data. Because Protegrity enables embedded security and compliance measures to travel with the data wherever it goes, authorization for access is a one-and-done process.
• When business units and AI architects have easier access to data, they can complete their work faster and more efficiently, potentially accelerating the deployment of revenue-generating applications, products, and services.

Let’s explore these factors in more detail.

Data: the lifeblood of business

In business today, nothing happens without data; lots of it. Those who collect, analyze, and apply information in the most effective ways have the best chances of success. The advent of agentic AI makes this even more true.

In this environment, anything that slows access to data is not just an annoyance, it’s a business liability. Some call this a “data friction tax”.

Numerous studies have found that delayed/denied access to data is a significant drain on productivity – to the point that some professionals can spend 15 percent (sometimes much more) of their workday chasing information and/or waiting for access approval.

If that’s true in your organization, then reducing or eliminating those delays can equate to a productivity increase of 10 or more percent for some of the most strategic members of your workforce. Delays can, in turn, cause other problems, such “stale data” that can cause AI models to produce a false or useless answer and lead to rework. These effects further sap productivity and increase the “cost of delay” – the opportunity cost swallowed when a new product, enhanced feature or innovative solution reaches the market later than planned (or, even worse, after competitors do it first).

There’s another negative impact of data friction, and it has grown into a serious problem: shadow AI. Workers are no longer waiting for data through normal channels; they are actively circumventing security measures and governance protocols to get their jobs done. Shadow AI amplifies the chances of data leaks and introduces a new vector of risk: inadvertent consequences from the actions of well-intentioned insiders, not just malevolent outsiders.

Multiple positive results

So, what’s the practical, measurable impact of key knowledge workers getting easier, faster access to data? It’s accelerated time to value. So, what does that mean?

The short answer is generating more revenue sooner. The longer answer has four elements:

• Incremental revenue. Say you expected to launch a new product July 1, with revenue forecasts of $5 million for the second half of the year. If you’re able to move that launch date up by two months, that’s potentially $1.6 million or so added to annual sales.
• Early-mover advantage. An earlier product launch will lower your customer acquisition cost and potentially gain added customers if you’re the first or unique supplier.
• Extended lifecycle. The earlier you start the sales cycle, the longer you can maintain higher margins before competition and time threaten your position.
• NPV acceleration. If any or all the previous three phenomena occur, you pull cash flow forward, which your CFO will love.

Monetizing data

There’s yet another category of revenue-producing opportunities from frictionless data: monetization. In other words, putting data to use beyond the normal work of individuals, teams, or departments. Some examples include:

• Internal monetization: making restricted datasets available to other parts of the organization (e.g., R&D, marketing, customer support, finance) who can create new products and services on their own.
• Data as a service: selling aggregated, anonymized data (and insights based on it) to other players in your industry.
• Training data: serving the needs of specialized companies with narrowly focused AI initiatives who need clean data to train models for vertical industries or specific applications.
• Collaboration: you and a partner create a secure environment in which you pool your data and run queries on it.

Finally, faster access to more information can result in uplifts to existing business through techniques such as cross-selling, upselling, and customized solutions.

Here are some examples of how enterprises have benefited from reduced data friction:

• A major financial-services firm saw a 90 percent reduction in time-to-value for data-analytics applications once it standardized on Protegrity.
• A top-five global bank was able to move 70 percent of its workloads to the cloud, allowing dispersed teams to collaborate more effectively on new ventures.
• Two of the world’s largest banks confirm that Protegrity allowed them to access data across borders without security concerns. As a result, they were able to enter new markets more quickly.

Data security and scrupulous governance do not have to be strictly expenses. With creativity, diligence – and the benefits of Protegrity’s unique solutions – organizations can turn common-sense measures into top-line additions.

The insights we have offered here complement the findings of an earlier Forrester study that calculated one customer’s total economic return from adopting Protegrity.

The next blog in this series will explore the theme of minimizing risk. In the meantime, learn how enterprises are benefitting from Protegrity solutions by reading some customer case studies.