
How Much is Your Data Worth? Tweet
It's been said that a company's data is its most important resource. If this is true, then is it possible to assign a monetary value to your files? If you attempted to do so, you may come to the conclusion that your company's data is more valuable than anything else in your business, maybe even your own job!
Determining the Value of Your Data
Assigning value to your data can be a difficult task to accomplish, primarily because some files are more valuable than others. For example, your file of hilarious memes has little-to-no value to anybody except you and your funny bone, whereas the file containing contact information for every client and vendor would be categorized as "super valuable." To assign an accurate value to your data, you would have to take into consideration discrepancies like this.
Evaluating the worth of every single file in your company's server would be a cumbersome task. Doing an exercise like this really isn't recommended, because ultimately, it's a huge waste of time. However, if you were to do it, you would take the sum total of the value of every file and then divide that figure by how many gigabytes (or even kilobytes) your organization is using. This will give you a per-byte average of how much your company's data is worth.
Data Insurance Assessment
Of course, the value that you would assign to your own data is a completely subjective number. If you took this number to an insurance company and asked them to insure your business for what you think you're data is worth, they would want to perform their own assessment of your data's value. If an insurance company were to assign a value to your data, they might use the same three values they use to insure property.
- Market or Appraised Value (MV): How much a given piece of property is worth to another buyer.
- Assessment Value (AV): The value placed on a property for municipal tax purposes.
- Replacement Cost Value (RCV): The value placed on a piece of property by an insurance company for the purpose of coverage.