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The Power of Data—on a Camel!
Several months ago, I went to Dubai on vacation. Despite the fact that I had heard it was very modern, I envisioned a challenging, ultra-traditional, developing country. To my great surprise, everybody spoke English, there were Starbucks and ATMs everywhere and best of all, my Blackberry worked perfectly. Even on a desert safari while riding a camel, my Blackberry worked and I had a conference call with the office!
Dubai had a very solid plan to become the Financial Center of the Middle East. The country has invested tremendously in developing the infrastructure to support these efforts—as evidenced by my Blackberry working in the desert! However, a few months ago, the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority announced that Blackberry messenger, Blackberry email and Blackberry web-browsing services in the UAE will be suspended as of October 11th, 2010. Apparently, the main issue is the encryption of the data that Blackberry services provide and the fact that the data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign commercial entity (a Canadian company).
It is hard to imagine conducting business without instant access to information especially in a city with aspirations to be a, “Financial Center.” What will the effect of this ban be in the development of Dubai? What will happen to an economy without access to real-time data? What happens to mobile payments? Could their strategic plan crumble as a result of Blackberry services’ encryption capabilities?
It is interesting to compare the Dubai situation with the continuous data security challenges we face in the payments industry. In our industry, the focus is protection of the data and the technology used to protect the data. Our objective is to prevent fraud; but in making the data inaccessible to fraudsters, the unintended consequences can be inefficient processes or limit data available to legitimate business divisions. In Dubai, it appears to be more extreme. The government wants to have access to data for national security reasons and to presumably monitor moral standards.
It is amazing to me that the protection of data can have such far-reaching consequences - consequences that could change the fate of a nation or an entire industry. In the meantime, as of October 2010, no more conference calls while riding a camel in the desert!
-Martha
