Your customers are the most important people to your business. Without customers, you don’t have sales, and without sales, your business can’t survive. With cyber-security being such a big talking point these days, it’s extremely important to make sure you’re protecting your customer’s personal data. You might have a great product or service, but a single security breach can be all it takes to totally destroy your brand’s reputation. Here are a few important steps to protecting your business customer data on today’s modern world of internet technology.
Switch to a Dedicated Server
As soon as you can afford to, anyway. Shared servers have obvious appeal to small businesses, as they’re a lot cheaper and more accessible. However, using these means that other people aside from your employees will have access to all the data you’re using the server to store. This includes your customers’ private information. Your website could become extremely vulnerable due to a lack of security on another company’s website. Although it’s much more expensive, switching to a dedicated server is a very smart move. This will work wonders to lower the chance of your information being stolen by an outside party.
Use Facial Recognition Software
Facial recognition technology is developing rapidly, and making waves in various business arenas. While the majority of businesses have been using it for internal security, there’s huge potential for making your customers’ buying activities more secure. With customer identity verification as part of your check-out process, your customers will be able to use the camera in whatever device they’re using to establish that it’s really them using the account, not a malicious hacker looking to steal their information. Aside from making your customer data more secure, this can also improve the UX of your website, eliminating the need for long and irritating verification processes.
Restrict Access Privileges
As part of managing your customer’s data, you need to roll back access privileges for people who have no real “need to know”. This means keeping them as far away from sensitive customer data as possible, while still allowing them the freedom to do their job. It can be hard to get the balance right, but it’s better to inconvenience your employees than to put your customer data at risk. Keep everything sensitive in a centralized location, and protected by all the security measures you can practically afford. If you have remote workers, make sure their devices are equipped for secure VPN access.
Get a Malware Monitoring Service
In many cases, when a website is hacked, the owners have no idea until it’s too late. Fortunately, there are many services that will protect your website, and more importantly, its users, from the threat of malware. It will also send you alerts if your site has been compromised in some way, or actually infected by malware. There’s a lot of choice here, and a lot of difference in price depending on what the service actually does. Assess your risk, determine how much protection you need, and then put the right system in place.
