5 Tips to Protect Your Customers’ Data

by Valerie Hawkins

In the next few weeks, holiday shoppers will hustle in and out of your shop to either pick up last-minute gifts or grab much-needed espresso.

But when you have more customers, whether in your store or online, you’ll have more customer data like names, email addresses and credit card numbers in your business’ system.

This puts you at a higher risk for a data breach.

We partnered with CyberScout to provide you with 5 simple steps to help protect your customers from holiday-minded hackers. 

1. Limit access

• Limit physical access to computers, as well as access to networks and protected data.
• Enforce strong user names and passwords.

2. Encrypt your data

• Even if hackers get into a system, they can’t view encrypted data unless they have specific encryption keys.
• If your company issues laptops or smartphones, which can easily be lost, whole drive encryption programs are a must. It can lock out thieves, even if the device is in their hands.

3. Train your employees

• Educate your employees on how to follow security best practices and spot potential data exposures, like phishing scams in emails.
• Teach safe browsing habits and block access to download from insecure websites.

4. Keep only necessary data

• Only ask for necessary personal information, store it in a secure manner, and destroy it when it's no longer needed. This limits the amount of data a hacker can access should a data breach occur.

5. Check into business cyber coverage

• Even with the most careful planning, data breaches can still happen. Business cyber coverage can help you recover quickly and confidently if your customer or employee information is compromised.

Whether you have a physical storefront, online ordering system, or both, it’s never too early to prepare for a for a data breach. But it can be too late. 

Learn more about our business cyber protection today.