A recent security breach at Target has cost the retail chain $10 million in compensation payments. However, this amount is only a drop in the ocean in the larger scheme of things. Ensuring the security and confidentiality of customer data is paramount to every business today. Even one attack compromising a few thousand customer data is enough to create a permanent dent in the customers’ confidence in your business.
Large businesses are not the only ones to be susceptible to such security breaches. Even small retail stores that hold customer data like address, phone numbers and purchase history are likely targets for security attacks. But unlike large businesses that have the size and resources to make a comeback from such attacks, large scale security breaches may sound the death knell for small companies.
The following tips will help you better protect your customers from such breaches.
Keep Default Configurations Secure:
Do you share the initial configurations of your product with your customer over email? Alternately, do you have default passwords for each customer? These are volatile security systems that make it possible for hackers to break into the system with publicly available data. As a first step, keep the default configurations of your systems secure and unique to each customer. Plus, do not share these details over email.
Encrypt All Customer Information:
If you handle any kind of customer information on your servers, it is extremely critical to manage this over a secure socket layer (SSL). This ensures the data is encrypted and is not readable by interceptors and hackers.
Train Your Employees With Security Best Practices:
Despite stringent security standards, handling of server access is often lax in a lot of companies, big or small. Create best practices within your organization with regards to data management. As a business owner, invest in a highly secure password manager to handle accessibility within your organization. Additionally, build a testing team that is well aware of security protocols is important to test your product for design risks.
Create Roadblocks For Non-Secure Systems:
Depending on what you sell, you can either set up automatic upgrades of your system (which will ensure that your customers are always on the most secure platform) or notify customers periodically to update to the latest version. While UX designers frown upon the use of roadblocks, as a business owner who is concerned about the security of your customers, it is important to build a system where customers do not have a choice but upgrade to the most secure version of your product. This is not only important to protect their information, but is also necessary to prevent a PR nightmare arising from security breaches.
Customer security is the most important aspect of any business. As a business owner, the onus is on you to ensure that the customers who trust you and your business are not at the receiving end of security breaches. Besides legal implications of such breaches, it is also a moral obligation that businesses have towards their customers.
