Tips on how to secure your customers’ data.

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How to secure customer data?

Customer data security is essential and always in the spotlight for one primary reason: Your business depends on it! To simplify things, follow these five significant steps in securing customer data:

1. Only collect the most vital data: focusing on only necessary data will enhance your customer confidence and decrease your data's external value.

Asking the consumer for endless unnecessary information triggers questions about why the company needs all this data and what it needs it for, leading users to lose confidence in the company. Therefore, regular auditing of your information is a fundamental step in ensuring your company is compliant with applicable Data Privacy Laws and is essential for clearing out unnecessary collected data over the years.

Alongside this, collecting just the necessary data will reduce the risks of hackers since they are less likely to steal low-value data.

2. Restrict access to data: Not everyone on your team should have access to the data in your system. Think of it as vulnerable points; the more users, the weaker. For example, if you have 15 users and all 15 have access to all the data, that's 15 vulnerable points. If one of these users has a weak password, you're jeopardizing your entire system, leaving it open to brute attacks.

In short, the fewer employees who have access to your customer data, the less the risk of internal data abuse. Limiting employees' access to only the tools they need will give you visibility to what needs to be cut off.

3. Use password management tools: good password management tools use complex encryption for the passwords they store. Everyone tends to use a simple password because it's much easier to remember. However, complex passwords are too complicated to generate and recall. Using password management tools, create and store complex passwords for all the tools and software your team uses, boosting your cybersecurity and protecting you from hackers. In addition to shutting off access to all tools if someone exits the company, password management tools safeguard customer data.

4. Avoid data silos: Data silos are another equivalent to vulnerabilities. Storing data in silos means keeping pieces of data in different places. This becomes a vulnerability, mainly when you can no longer track where specific data is stored and when a data breach occurs. Instead of data silos, consider a customer management strategy with a straightforward approach to where information is kept and how data is handled. In addition to what data you're collecting and why leading us back to point 1; more customer confidence and better data audit.

5. Set minimum security standards: Your data is only as secure as your tools. Double-check the tools you are already using and make sure they comply with security standards ISO 27001 and SOC2. Anytime you consider adding a new device, always make sure it is as secure as possible to ensure the security of your data.

As a general rule, unprotected customer data will make you susceptible to hacks. This will cost you consumer confidence, customer leaving, fines, lawsuits, and more.

Cybercrime is on the rise. Cybercrime is a big business with more than 1.5 trillion in revenue and is not going anywhere anytime soon. So remember, some laws protect data security like GDPR and CCPA for California Consumer Privacy Act; these are well-drafted specific laws for consumer data protection, make sure you comply with them.