Securing your customer data 5 steps to protect this critical information

by Guy Reed, PR Consultancy

revolves around five key steps.

Working with customer data is not straightforward. It The reality is that protecting the critical information of your customers requires you to pay close attention to multiple different and business revolves around these laws and regulations, critical steps. As long as you take the depending on where time to educate yourself and don’t you operate. With cut any corners, little can go wrong. laws like the GDPR 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.

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.

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. 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.

If you often ignore those pesky update notifications, this one’s for you. There’s a good reason companies keep putting out a new version of their software. It’s not always about better usability – in fact, that’s often not even a priority.

They might even be in the strangest, most unexpected places. Maybe you don’t expect to get compromised through your PDF reader when opening a malicious document, but that was a popular attack vector at one point. Even image formats get compromised from time to time. And it only takes one successful attack to bring down your entire organization. The bottom line is, the next time you get prompted to install an update for some application, do it right away.

You may be familiar with all the critical security practices that you should be following. However, that doesn’t mean much if your employees aren’t on the same page. Companies often get compromised through social engineering. There doesn’t have to be a weakness in your systems if your employees are willing to give up critical information. And sometimes, if the attacker does their job right, your workers won’t even know that they are being targeted.

Such attacks can be more difficult to defend against. It’s not impossible though – you just have to provide your employees with the right kind of training. Run regular phishing training sessions and go over the materials with employees having trouble. Test your networks – there are companies you can hire that can help you with that. The way you approach problems in this area is important as well.

You might even promote an internal culture for sharing appropriate tips for staying safe that way.

Last but not least, take some time to think about how your data is organized to begin with. There’s often no need to have every single point of your database accessible from everywhere else. Organize things into logical sectors and isolate them in a sensible way. That way, even if someone does manage to get into your networks, their access will be limited to their immediate node. If you’ve set things up the right way, attackers should never be able to compromise too much of your information at once.

Of course, that’s not always possible. The way some companies work requires them to provide their systems with access to a lot of different data storage facilities at once. In that case, you should pay more attention to the other points listed above. A strong underlying security foundation is still the most important factor.

Don’t treat data as a scary beast that’s difficult to work with. The reality is that protecting the critical information of your customers and business revolves around these critical steps. As long as you take the time to educate yourself and don’t cut any corners, little can go wrong.

If you get targeted by a directed attack, that changes things. But in that case, you should be working with dedicated specialists to resolve the situation. It’s a very different story that requires its own special approach.

Originally published by Manta at manta.com. Manta is one of the largest online resources dedicated to small business. Learn more and create your free company profile at manta.com.