How to Keep Your Customer Data Safe and Secure?

Modern businesses depend on reliable merchant accounts and the ability to engage in credit card processing to increase their revenue. Certain business owners are concerned that merchant account services used to establish credit card processing gives rise to the...  

 

Modern businesses depend on reliable merchant accounts and the ability to engage in credit card processing to increase their revenue. Certain business owners are concerned that merchant account services used to establish credit card processing gives rise to the problem of opening their customer’s private data up to hackers. In turn, these business owners are hesitant to risk their company’s reputation against a data breach. With sound secure data management protocols in place, the problem of data breeches should be relatively easy to avoid. Here are some steps a company will need to take to establish a solid secure data management policy to ensure their customer’s data remains safe.

Beyond Background Checks

When hiring employees that will have access to company servers and sensitive customer data, it is important to make sure all employees are able to pass a background check. Even if employees are able to pass a background check, it never hurts to do further online investigation into the background of a prospective employee. Many criminal activities can be expunged from a person’s record, which only serves to make a background check less than 100-percent accurate. Checking for online character details on social media sites helps to ensure a more well-rounded investigation of a prospective employee’s potentially hidden criminal background. Remember, it is the people closest to customer data that end up potentially being the weak link in any company’s secure data management efforts.

Encrypt Customer Data

If a company keeps customer data on in-house servers or in the cloud, it is vital to employ the use of tested encryption techniques to ensure that hackers will not be able to use any data to which they gain access. The trick to encrypting data is to make sure that only trusted people know how to decrypt the data. This means that not every employee in a company should have access to the company’s data decryption procedure or decryption software. The less people who have access, the better this is for the company and its customers.

Restrict Computer Access

Another way to prevent data breaches of sensitive customer data from occurring is to restrict access to the computers holding this data. Restricting when these computers can be online will prevent customer data breaches when it is not necessary for these computers to actually be online. Limiting a single computer being able to access such information also helps to minimize potential customer data breeches as well. It also makes it possible to monitor such use by camera and access code entry to pin-point any potential threat to a company’s customer data.

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