Never has customer safety been so in the hands of businesses as it is in today’s digital marketplace. With digital commerce serving as the major driver of the global economy, your business necessarily stores and deals with sensitive customer data on the internet. And yet many businesses are woefully underprepared to successfully protect their customers’ data from the cybercriminals that are looking to take it. Here are three things your business can and should do to safeguard your customer data.
Use Strong Encryption and Passwords
There is nothing more essential to start safeguarding customer data than to beef up your encryption and passwords. Your passwords must be secure to start with, and that doesn’t mean tough to guess, but close to impossible to guess. If you use easy to guess passwords, you are giving hackers easy access to the front door into your sensitive user data. Encryption is a process of coding your sensitive data while it is in transit from your site to your servers, which can keep hackers from understanding intercepted data. The stronger your encryption, the harder it is for hackers to decipher.
Use Cloud Storage
The cloud has been around for a while now and yet many people still don’t understand what it does and why it can help safeguard customer data. The cloud is not an ephemeral location out in the interwebs like many people believe, but a network of physical warehouse locations that house massive servers for your data. These huge networks allow you to subscribe to use space in them, so that anyone has access to major servers that can handle huge volumes of traffic and info as well as the state-of-the-art cybersecurity. Public cloud options are more affordable and the most popular option for data storage. Store customer data in the cloud for the best cybersecurity.
Wipe Old Computers
This one may sound a little crazy, but hear it out. If you are getting rid of an old computer that used to store sensitive data, you need to wipe the hard drive completely before dumping it, selling it, or donating it. Hackers can access old hard drives and harvest the data on them or the data that was recently deleted from them. Don’t let an old computer disrupt your customer data protection!
Customer data is one of the most valuable assets that your business holds. You need to protect it to the best of your ability on the internet. Make sure to follow these three tips to safeguard customer data as best you can!