Sports fans hearts got crushed while others jumped with glee this past Sunday as they rooted for their favorite football players across the nation. Those who joined fantasy football leagues prior to the season starting were no exception. Thoughts raced through everyone’s heads as the games progressed. Did they pick the right players? What happens if their quarterback was benched for an injury? Did they do enough to ensure they picked the winning team?

“Let's work together to identify the ways we'll measure the effectiveness of my work,” Julie Igorevna, founder and digital superhero of Kur8 tells her new clients. Igorevna runs a digital marketing and PR boutique agency that enables tech start-ups to get their story heard. “We strive to help our clients find their creative voice through a variety of services.” So much of today’s marketing industry is driven by statistics that it practically goes hand and hand. Upon opening her agency, Igorevna knew she wanted to incorporate data in her business model to ensure that she could contribute to her clients’ success. “Our data shows that for every $1 spent on email marketing; $44 is made in return.”

Data can help a company create competitive advantages, enhance customer service, improve marketing efforts, and develop efficiencies within the company. Data can also be misused, mishandled and cause expensive and sometimes irrevocable mistakes. As with anything powerful, data can be dangerous if not understood and integrated effectively…and this must start at the top. Executives are embracing the data explosion that’s growing exponentially from industries such as platform data solutions, serverless computing data management, machine learning, IoT, and numerous other fields. Dun & Bradstreet found recently that 63% of business leaders saying that data has helped them mitigate risks.

Paige Thompson was indicted on July 29, 2019 for allegedly stealing data from Capital One Financial Corp. Thompson is charged with gaining access to over one million credit card applications due to a misfiguration within the bank’s firewall settings that Thompson was able to infiltrate. The alleged theft took place on March 23^rd of this year when Thompson used a Tor browser to hide her identity and hack into the bank’s files. She was able to not only steal credit card applications but over 140 thousand social security numbers, 80 thousand bank account numbers, and approximately one million Canadian Social Insurance Numbers dating back from 2015.