April 2019

Is your company doing everything it can to protect your customer’s data? If not, you should consider outsourcing your data processing to secure data services company. Data security is crucial if you want to safeguard your customers’ privacy and your company’s reputation for security. The names are well known and belong to companies that should have had better data security while processing their customer’s documents. Among these companies that allowed security breaches are:  J.P. Morgan Chase and Target. These security breaches resulted in compromising the sensitive information of millions of customers. These companies were big enough and well-staffed enough to know better than to leave their customer’s information exposed. So, if attention is not paid to data security while processing it, no matter how big an institution may be, they can still be to hacked. How much more vulnerable is your company’s data when it is being processed?

Why Does My Company’s Data Processing Need to be Secure?

To sufficiently emphasize the significance of data security, you need to know what exactly constitutes data. Data is vital information about your customer or your company. Some of the data are things such as names, addresses, birthdates, financial information, social security numbers, and driver’s license information. If your company handles medical issues, then you have another layer of data to protect required by HIPAA laws, a patient’s health information. If a hacker can obtain any of this information because of a security breach, the results can be devastating to both your customers and your company. When someone’s data is stolen, it can cause acute disruptions to their life. You have probably read stories about identity theft and credit card fraud; perhaps you experienced them yourself. These violations of privacy are among the most critical issues companies have to deal with while processing sensitive consumer information. You may or may not have a system and procedure in place to protect your customer and business data. You may think that everything is operating with no security breaches – but are you really doing enough to protect your customer and company’s data? Why take the unnecessary risk of being hacked. Your company runs the risk of losing loyal customers and incurring a diminished brand reputation by losing sensitive customer data.  That is why you should consider a third party who can securely process your data.

What to Look for in a Data Services Company

You need to be sure that the company you hire to process your data is up to date with the latest security advances and has a commitment to protecting all your company’s and customer’s data.  Any data services company you use should have clear and logical security protocols in place and meet industry security standards. Some things to look for are certifications such as SOC2/Type II. A SOC2/Type II certification ensures that a data services company has specific security protocols in place. A data services company’s systems must meet stringent principles and criteria set forth by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Another sign of that a data services company will protect your company’s data is if they are PCI compliant. PCI compliant means that the data services company meets the Payment Card Industry Security Standard.  The PCI standard means that they can safely store customer card information without the chance of a security breach. Of course, if your company is in the medical field, then you want to be sure the data processing company is HIPPA compliant.

When you have researched the security standards of a data services company, you can rest easy that when they process your data, it won’t fall into the wrong hands.