For any business, managing customer data is a very important aspect that should be taken seriously. When that data of a customer includes their payment data, you need to be even more careful due to its sensitive nature. You have to understand that data back up and recovery are invaluable resources; a database can be the equivalent of a gold mine in this era. If you can safely store and manage this payment data, you can go on to utilize it for your business’s advantage. However, if you fail to keep that data secure, it might lead to a huge problem for your business and it could even cause a significant loss of customer trust in your company.
There are a few key tips that you should always keep in mind to ensure that this data is stored conveniently both for you and your customers. This article explores the key ways that you could utilize to manage this data without risking any breach, and we’ll be discussing them to make sure that you have a proper understanding of all the processes involved. So let’s get to it and find out how to manage the invaluable payment card data for your business.
1. Be Selective
If you’re gathering data from your customers, you have to be selective about the data that you choose to store. If you hold too much payment data, it can lead to data saturation where you won’t be able to ensure maximum security and efficiency. Having too much data on hand will hinder your decision-making abilities and you’ll be unnecessarily slowed down by it. If you can ensure that you hold onto the most important data only, you’ll have much fewer points of a data breach and this will help you maintain your security better. While collecting and saving data, try to think about whether or not it’ll be actually useful for you or your customers if you hold on to that data. If you feel like some of it isn’t very important, then it might be best that you let it go in order to avoid any unnecessary data saturation issues.
2. Security is Paramount
We’ve been witnessing a slew of ransomware and hackers holding the personal data of people hostage for many years now. Everyone is aware of how valuable their data is, and people want to ensure that their data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. You’ll be gathering a lot of sensitive data about your customers like their credit card numbers, addresses, phone numbers, names, and much more. If this critical data gets leaked, your company’s name will be tarnished and future customers will be wary of trusting you again. You should implement any number of security measures needed to prevent this from happening since it’s a question of your business’s reputation. Try to get PCI compliance for your company, it’ll help show that you comply with PCI standards, which means that your company processes, stores, and transmits data in a safe and secure manner. You can also try to implement some sort of secure data management system, take backups at a secured remote location, or even try to educate your employees about the best practices they should follow to avoid any unauthorized access.
3. Create Backups
If you lose your data, it can spell disaster for your company. It’s been found that most small businesses shut down soon after they lose their data and you don’t want to risk this catastrophic failure. If you can create backups of your data, it will be safe no matter what, you’re essentially minimizing any risks due to data loss in the future. Even though data is such an important aspect for any business, the smaller companies often neglect payment data storage and end up losing it. To protect your customers and your business from any risks, you can try to create multiple backups, but that entirely depends on your budget. There are also a few other considerations that you should keep in mind while choosing a backup option like the plan, cloud, backup location, recovery plan (if any), and some other factors.
4. Proper Authorization
If you provide your employees with too many privileges and multiple accesses that they don’t even need, there are bound to be some undesired consequences. You should strictly regulate all the information that your employees can access and distribute the privileges only according to what they need. Even though you trust your staff, you can’t always be 100% sure that there won’t be any misuse of power. Some business owners distribute the various authorizations regardless of how much an employee needs them and this is a practice that leads to irrevocable damage to your company. Another thing that you must remember is to revoke the access you gave to an ex-employee of your company. Ex-employees don’t care much about their previous employers and might even do something negative if they’re disgruntled or hold any sort of grudges against your business.
These are some of the tips that you can implement in your business to manage the payment data better. Remember, this data isn’t only critical for your business, it’s also highly sensitive, which is why you can’t allow any leaks or loss of data. Your failure to ensure privacy and security might even lead to long-term consequences for your customers, and if your customers are affected negatively, you can guarantee that your business will take a nosedive. The costs of keeping this data stored safely and establishing a proper access mechanism are usually significant investments. It can be even more significant in your case if you’re a small business owner. However, the costs of not ensuring safety and letting your data be unorganized are even greater which is why you want to invest at least the bare minimum. If you can’t invest in top-notch data manipulation and security tools, you can at least try to invest in some basic security features that can prevent any undesired breaches or access issues in the future.
