Ways For A Business To Secure Customers’ Data: 7 Guidelines To Follow

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Post By: Pratik Salia, Devicemax

Data security is crucial for businesses to ensure safety and confidentiality of customers’ data. It lies at the core of running a business successfully by providing customers the confidence that their data is being collected, processed and transferred securely. However, as data breaches become increasingly common, maintaining the security of customer data has become a major concern for businesses. A data breach can pose a threat to security of your customers as well as the future of your business.

Following are the 7 ways how businesses can secure customers’ data

Email Gateway Security – Malware and ransomware attacks are still prevalent and in a majority of cases, they use email as the source to get this malicious code into your company. Therefore, secure email gateways, helps enterprises to increase security by detecting and preventing access to malicious URLs, embedded code, phishing and malicious emails.

Additionally, with the help of email filtering, enterprises can scan inbound emails for potential threats found in both links as well as attachments. This helps to prevent malware from entering your network. Email filtering ensures that the email based malicious code never enters your network. Moreover, organizations can set up their firewall to only accept email from a known source.

Leverage A Mobile Device Management Solution – The increasing usage of mobile devices in workplaces can create significant security and management challenges, especially if they hold confidential business data. However, leveraging mobile device management solution enables businesses to manage, monitor and secure all the devices used in the enterprise.

It provides enterprises real time visibility over entire device inventory to ensure compliance and increase security of corporate data. The organizations can conduct compliance checks regularly to detect violations and increase security of corporate data.

Data Encryption – Companies handle a variety of data such as customer information, employee records, financial data and more. Therefore, it is very crucial for them to secure this information. Data encryption is one of the best ways for organizations to secure their confidential data.

Encryption is the process of scrambling data so that it is rendered unreadable to unauthorized users. Encrypted data can rarely be read by hackers without the specialized key. Also, end point full encryption can be employed to encrypt every last bit of data in your hard disk, thus, providing you a high form of protection.

Add a Firewall – Firewalls are the first line of defense against cyber attacks on your corporate network because they isolate one network from another. The firewalls help to exclude undesirable traffic from entering the network. It assists in monitoring and filtering incoming and outgoing network traffic based on the company’s previously established security policies.

Firewalls help to block malware and application layer attacks. They act on previously set policies to protect the business network and carry out quick assessments to detect suspicious activity such as malware and shut it down.

Password Protection – Many of the employees in an enterprise use easily guessable passwords or use the same password for different services. This can weaken the security of confidential data. Therefore, the enterprises need to tell their employees to make their passwords complex and at least eight characters longer.

A strong password includes capitalized letters, lowercase letters, special characters and numbers. The more complex your password, the more protection you can provide to your confidential data. Also, the employees need to change their passwords frequently.

Make Sure Personal Devices Stay Compliant – Businesses are increasingly adopting BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy to increase employee productivity. Although, adoption of BYOD policy offers numerous benefits to organizations, it also poses a security threat to the confidential business data accessed through these devices.

This is where BYOD management software plays a significant role. BYOD management solution helps businesses to create a work profile on employee owned devices to keep corporate and personal data separate. It enables enterprises to enforce strong security and data protection policies to secure corporate information.

Use A VPN (Virtual Private Network) – Many a times, your field employees use public Wi-Fi hotspots to share files with other team members or their manager. This can come at a high cost. Every time an employee uses Wi-Fi networks, they are actively increasing the risk of outsiders gaining access to confidential business information.

Therefore, using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) helps to ensure no one is snooping on your connection. A VPN secures data that you share through public networks. It works by creating an encrypted connection between your device and the remote private network. A Virtual Private Network allows employees to access website, share files remotely, etc without their data being monitored, tracked and stored.

Summing it up:

Reputation takes years to build. And, a data breach does not only pose a security threat to confidential business information, but also, leaves a negative impact on brand reputation. Therefore, no business today should overlook implementing security measures to protect their customers’ data.