Ensuring Client Data Security

By Sara Crawford, Ph.D., President

Sustainable Environmental Consultants prides itself on building trust with farmers to gather data and information needed to perform analysis and reporting for its clients. As part of this service, Sustainable Environmental Consultants stores a variety of inputs and farm output attributes in its proprietary EcoPractices® platform. Some examples are seed type, chemical type, fertilizer quantities, yield, soil sampling results, and any other operational data that farmers keep in their normal course of business.

We have implemented several measures to ensure the protection of this data. Even beyond essential data protection, a company’s ability to demonstrate that they can protect data can actually be a differentiator and competitive advantage in this space. For Sustainable Environmental Consultants, the first measure we have in place is two-factor authentication, which is required for all internal employees to access account information stored on EcoProducer. We also recently completed a first round of third-party penetration testing, a process where we hired professionals to perform an evaluation of the security systems we have in place to identify any hidden vulnerabilities. The platform passed this testing and will be undergoing further testing in the upcoming year. We believe it is critical to continually perform testing and update security as malicious parties seeking to hack into systems evolve and change their tactics every day.