No customer wants their data to get hacked or lost. It’s a nightmare situation for them and almost always leads to them ditching a company and switching to another one instead. This is why you need to protect your customer data at all costs. When you do this, you can:
- Maintain your business reputation;
- Keep customers happy;
- Avoid financial damages.
It’s a no-brainer. You can continue operating without implementing customer data protection best practices. However, this is extremely risky, as any business (yours included) can fall victim to a cyberattack. Naturally, this is a scary prospect — so it’s time to focus on your customer data protection.
Learn How to Protect Your Customer Data (Easy Guide): Use GRC Software
Using GRC software supplied by www.surecloud.com, your business can adopt better data security measures and gain greater control over your customer data.
Whenever you want to start a new project that involves customer data, you’ll also be able to use the GRC software to streamline your DPIAs (Data Protection Impact Assessments). This way, you’ll fully understand the potential data risks involved and what you need to do to eliminate these risks.
Encrypt Customer Data
A big (and exciting) trend over recent years has been businesses encrypting their customer data. If you were to also encrypt your customer data, this would mean that (even if the data was hacked or stolen) the cybercriminals wouldn’t be able to read or understand it. It’s like robbing a bank card with information and numbers that are impossible to read.
So, to make life extremely difficult for hackers moving into the future, you should encrypt all of your customer data. This is something that can be easily done and won’t cost you much money, making it more than worth it.
Avoid Phishing Scams
According to research, a huge 3.4 billion – yep, billion – phishing emails are sent daily. Some emails are sent to people, while others are explicitly sent to businesses.
Why? Because if an employee clicks on the phishing link inside an email’ll give the hacker access to what they want. Often, this is customer data, so you must avoid phishing scams at all costs. Otherwise, the consequences can be deadly.
How to Protect Your Business from Phishing Emails
To protect your business from phishing emails, all your employees must be trained to identify them. Some of the tell-tale signs of a phishing email are:
- Unfamiliar greetings;
- Poor grammar;
- A strange email address;
- Urgent wording that encourages you to click on a link;
- Requests for sensitive information (such as bank details;)
Remember, if your employees don’t know how to spot phishing emails, then you’re potentially putting your customer data in danger.
Destroy Data When It’s No Longer Needed
Got customer data stored in the cloud that you no longer need? Destroy it. Once the data has been destroyed, there’s nothing for the cybercriminals to steal. On top of this, it’ll also free up storage space for your business, which is an added bonus.
