Companies are now generating, collecting and analysing unprecedented amounts of information. The strategic importance of thisinformation across the business, from toplevel strategy and decision-making to product development right through to sales and marketing, means it needs to be available to the right people at the right time in the right form. The perceived value of this information has never been higher. In a survey of global executives conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, nearly one in three respondents estimates the value of information held by their organisation to be between 10% and 50% of total assets. Information is now big, borderless and beyond the control of individual companies. Technology developments like cloud computing are perceived to have increased the risks to information. Greater collaboration and data sharing with other companies, through the likes of open innovation, supply chain integration and outsourcing, is elevating risk even more. As these trends create “borderless” information beyond the control of the individual company, addressing and governing the future risks will involve closer collaboration, involving businesses as well as governments. “Information is the new oil” is a common refrain among businesspeople nowadays. The description goes far beyond world famous proprietary information like the recipe for Coca- Cola or Google’s search algorithm. This new oil is increasingly being extracted from “big data”—the petabytes of data being collected by companies from the connected universe, a lot of it about consumer habits.