How you can Protect Your Customers' Data as a New Business Owner

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Setting up your new business could be overwhelming because of the various steps you must take to run the company. According to the U.S Small Business Administration, starting a business takes 10 significant steps.  

Yet, you need to protect your customers' data after taking these steps. It is not a process you can skip as it plays a massive role in the success of your business. Likewise, you must identify why data privacy is important. 

So, to get you started, we shall outline some of the data you must protect as a business owner. We shall also show you how to protect them.

Which Customer Data needs Protection?

The answer is simple.All the customer data you collect need security. This section will highlight some of the data you should protect.

·      Name

·      Email address

·      Age

·      Phone number

·      Location

·      Bank details

·      Credit/debit card details

·      Health information

·      Biometrics

·      Social security number

·      IP (InternetProtocol) and MAC (Media Access Control Address)

5 Facts about Data Protection you should know as a new Business Owner

Data protection might be news if you are not a cybersecurity expert. Hence, we will show you five things you must know about data protection and why data privacy is important.

Data Protection is Irreplaceable

You cannot substitute data security with something else. For instance, you might only choose to take payment through cards in your business. 

That would be replacing physical cash with a card. This example is not possible with data protection. You cannot replace data protection with data privacy or anything else.

Data Protection is Essential

Data protection is essential to business as blood is to the life of man and animals. Therefore, your business needs data protection to succeed in this world of unending cyberthreats.

Data Protection keeps you Ahead

Other entities you transact with will place you above others if you protect your customers' data.Therefore, they will consider you safe to hand their data over to.

The Customers Care

Not all customers are carefree with their data. However, many of them know why data privacy is essential, so they want you to grant them privacy.

Things can go Wrong

There could be data breach attempts on your business.When they happen, data protection will prevent your data from theft.

Data Protection Measures you must take as a new Business Owner

Now that we've examined what data you must protect and what to know about data protection, we shall discuss how you can protect your customers' data. 

Educate your Team

Your employees play a huge role in your customers' data safety and insecurity. Their actions can open a loophole through which hackers can infiltrate our systems and networks. 

Therefore, organize regular staff training where cyber experts will educate them on what to do and what not to do. 

Have a BYOD Policy Guideline

As a new business, you might not be financially buoyant enough to buy work laptops, tablets, or smartphones for all your employees. So, you might have to let a few or all of them use their devices for work purposes. This arrangement can be budget-friendly, but it is unsafe.

However, making theBYOD policy safe to adopt requires you to set some guidelines for your employees to follow. 

First, make sure that their devices are not rooted or jailbroken. Then, prevent offline access to the company's files, ensure their devices are password-protected, and they update their software regularly.

Conduct Due Diligence

Thinking every company is safe to entrust your customers' data with is a costly assumption. So instead, research the email provider you want to use, the cloud service you wish to subscribe to, the antivirus software you want to buy, etc.

Brand popularity should not be your selection criterion. Find out how well these companies guard their customers' data before committing to them.

Backup Data

Store critical data on other platforms. In times of data loss or breaches, you will have another source to fall back on if you back up your data. For example, you could back them up in the cloud, on a hard disk, a flash drive, etc. Relying on the data you have on your devices is not enough.

Implement an Off-boarding Process

You might have to share some passwords with your employees at the on boarding stage. When these employees leave your organization, ensure to change all passwords. Doing this will deny them access to your company's data and accounts.

Data protection can be challenging for small businesses because of being new in the game. Hence, we compiled this blog post to help you know what to do. If you need a competent company to take over your data protection needs, contact Zendata. 

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