Businesses experience many benefits when they apply customer analytics to their marketing and sales strategies. For example, those who apply customer analytics have twice the likelihood of generating above-average profits compared to businesses that don’t use data.
However, handling customer data is a major responsibility. Data breaches can impact your customers just as much as your business. Let’s look at the major T-Mobile hacking as a perfect example. The breach affected 47 million customers and the hackers retrieved personal information such as names, phone numbers, and even account PIN numbers.
How do you secure customer data? Website security is your biggest tool. Here’s how to keep customer information safe.
Only Collect Data You Need
While this may seem like common sense, many businesses store data that they don’t need.
Storing unnecessary customer information is an easy way to combat cybercrime. For example, if a customer agrees to save their email for easier login and to receive marketing messages, then store their email. But if they don’t opt to store their credit card information, don’t collect and save that information.
What if you want to give customers the option to store their credit card details without the weight on your shoulders? Third-party processors can provide secure transactions while also storing customer financial information in a safe manner.
Update Your Hardware and Software
There’s a reason why your technology encourages you to update on a regular basis. One of the key features of regular updates is improved security. Delaying software updates can make your business more vulnerable. If you’re concerned about wasted time and money, only use software that updates quickly or auto-updates during out-of-office periods.
Encrypt Data
83% of businesses don’t encrypt sensitive data in the cloud. This is concerning for many reasons. For one, encryption is a compliance issue.
If your business sells products, you must encrypt your data when accepting credit and debit cards. According to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DDS), retailers must encrypt credit and debit card numbers stored in their database.
Even though not all data requires encryption, hackers can still access sensitive information such as email addresses during a data breach.
Why aren’t more businesses encrypting data? It sounds more difficult than it is. You can encrypt data on your personal devices, the cloud, and your website.
Encrypting your website is as easy as getting an SSL certificate. You can tackle two birds with one stone by encrypting data on your device first (right-click the file, go to the Advanced menu, and select “Encrypt Contents”) and upload the encrypted file to the cloud.
Minimize Data Availability
You’re likely extending data collection and storage across different platforms. Because of this, the likelihood of a data breach increases. However, the modern company is stuck. More employees are working from home, so you have to store your data in a remote environment.
There are still solutions to these problems. Inexpensive storage software options exist that offer different levels of encryption plus multi-factor authentication (MFA). There are also more business email plans that offer improved security. Last but not least, limit which workers can access customer information and train them on proper data management practices.
Improve Website Security With Web Hosting
There are times when customer data breaches are a website security issue. Don’t worry, we offer a solution to your problems. All of our business web hosting plans include an SSL certificate as well as generous storage, heavy traffic capabilities, and unlimited websites. Take a look at our business web hosting plans.
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