Data Analytics

Data is useful – especially if it’s been gathered, evaluated, and presented in a way that’s relevant. For safety professionals, data analytics from portable and wearable gas detectors helps in identifying trends and spotting worker behaviors that directly impact safety outcomes.

While data capture is an important part of the data analytics process, without analytics, it can be hard to connect data points. Analytics is the driver that facilitates your ability to synthesize the data points received from your connected devices efficiently and present them in a way that helps:

• Empower proactive safety awareness
• Inform smart decision making
• Ensure worker accountability and compliance

As an example, the MSA Grid, part of the MSA Connected Work Platform, helps industrial safety managers clearly visualize important aspects of their gas detection program. Even better, this cloud-based software provides fast, reliable, real-time visibility across worksites, workers, and workflows.

Result: You’ll have a more accurate picture of your gas detection fleet and likely spend less time monitoring and managing it.

Data Privacy

Data is powerful – and when it comes to safety, certain data requires more attention and care than others. Some data, such as personally identifiable information, may be subject to company rules, local laws, or global regulations.

Privacy obligations need to be understood and assessed for specific locations and uses.  Depending on the privacy laws in your area, for example, this could mean keeping private and protected certain personal information, such as worker roles, identification numbers, and locations.

We know how complex privacy rules and compliance can be, so our goal is to simplify compliance so that you can more easily meet your data privacy obligations – both internal to your organization and external to regulatory bodies. That’s why we carefully considered data privacy when we developed the MSA Connected Work Platform.

Under our subscription agreements available through MSA+, we enable you to own, control, and protect individual worker data. For example, you can choose to name devices for an individual worker, such as “John Doe’s device,” or you can choose something more discreet.

Result: While MSA is not in position to evaluate each company’s data privacy obligations for themselves and their workers, MSA has considered issues related to data privacy in the development of our Connected Work Platform, with the goal of making compliance with those regulations easier for you. 

Cybersecurity

Sensitive data must be available to authorized stakeholders yet kept secure from everyone else. That means cybersecurity needs to be considered.

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting critical systems and information from unauthorized users. It includes these two components:

1. Data availability: both making the data accessible to users and safeguarding the data so it doesn’t become lost or corrupted. Maintaining data availability is especially important for recordkeeping purposes and for ensuring compliance.
2. Data integrity: ensuring that relevant data from connected wearables is accurately and fully transferred to a secure location, such as the cloud. Because data integrity also means keeping data safe from outside forces, it should include having backup processes and recovery systems in place in the event data becomes compromised.

Safety io is the architecture technology and company that connects MSA hardware with Grid cloud-based software, and cybersecurity is a crucial component to that connection. The Safety io cybersecurity approach has three main pillars:

1. Strong partnerships with industry-leading experts and companies with respect to cybersecurity: Safety io´s infrastructure employs Amazon Web Services or AWS to offer a level of protection that’s difficult to achieve with any self-built infrastructure.
2. Built-in expertise: Safety io employs a dedicated cybersecurity team that continually evaluates risk and helps ensure an ongoing design that’s secure from cyberattacks.
3. Confidence and trust through Information Security Management System: Safety io´s Information Security Management System provides a framework that allows cybersecurity to be considered in every aspect of our day-to-day work, from Secure Software Development to physical office access. Our Information Security Management System is certified by an accredited third-party vendor to be compliant with the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 ISO/IEC 27001:2013 is an internationally recognized standard that details best practices for the management of information security and privacy.

Result: For safety managers who want to reap the benefits of connected work, it’s important to embrace the advanced technologies that make secure connectivity a reality, while also considering crucial issues like data analytics, cybersecurity, and data privacy.