BUSINESS
Securing your customer data
5 steps to protect this critical information by Guy Reed, PR Consultancy Protecting the critical information of your customers and business revolves around five key steps. Working with customer data is not straightforward. It requires you to pay The reality is that protecting the close attention to critical information of your customers multiple different and business revolves around these laws and regulations, critical steps. As long as you take the depending on where you operate. With time to educate yourself and don’t laws like the GDPR cut any corners, little can go wrong. and other similar legal frameworks, it can be very costly to ignore this aspect of your business. At the same time, getting your affairs in order can be an expensive ordeal if you need to hire specialists for the job. If you pay attention to a few critical factors though, you should be able to avoid most kinds of trouble on that front.
UAC MAGAZINE | SPRING 2019
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Keep multiple backups. Losing your business data can be disastrous. Losing the data of your customers man even mean the end of your company, depending on what services you provide. It’s happened to many companies in the past, and nobody is protected against data failure. Malfunctioning hard drives, cloud services going down, even theft – there are many ways you could potentially lose all your valuable information. That doesn’t have to be a huge issue if you have working backups of it though. The plural form of the word is key here.
A common mistake many businesses make is to only focus on one backup routine. What happens when your central backup storage location goes down? Even worse, you can occasionally see companies storing their backups in the same place as their main data. In the context of possible physical loss, it doesn’t make much sense to do that. Use encryption. Pretty much every important utility works with data support encryption nowadays. It’s a standard aspect of working with information, and you should take advantage of it. Enable encryption in all programs you’re using that support it. Look into how you can encrypt your other connections as well. Just because an application doesn’t come with encryption support out of the box, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
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You can use a virtual private network (VPN) as a general solution. A good VPN service, like, for example, NordVPN, will work with every application you have on your computer without any difficult configuration. A VPN extension can be installed on Chrome or any other browser, too. NordVPN will even work with your smartphone, allowing you to stay safe on the go. That way, you can safely access your company’s databases remotely without having to worry about security. Of course, make sure to keep your phone up to date as described above. Encryption won’t do much to help you when your device itself is compromised. Smartphones can be a very attractive target to attackers, so pay attention to the security of yours.
