What are best practices for securely handling customer data?

Best Practices for Securely Handling Customer Data

As threats become more advanced and small businesses become a target for cyber-attacks, the handling of your customer data is becoming more and more vital. Breaches not only impact you financially, but also your reputation. Securely handling your client information is a core part of your information security policy and overall stance. Let's face it, your customer is your customer because they trust you and how you run your business. A breach will violate that trust. This makes client data handling a vital piece of your overall customer experience. Let's look at some best practices when it comes to handling their data. 

Data Minimization

Collect Only Necessary Data: Only collect the data that is necessary for your business operations. If you don’t need it to conduct business with the individual or company, don’t gather it.
Avoid Over-Collecting: Avoid collecting excessive amounts of personal information, especially sensitive data.

Data Security

Strong Passwords: Use strong, unique passwords for all systems and accounts that handle customer data. 
Regular Updates: Keep your software and operating systems up-to-date with the latest security patches using a centralized patch management system (RMM or other technology)
Encryption: Encrypt sensitive data both at rest and in transit. Your Windows devices include BitLocker encryption and Mac OS has their file vault encryption.  Each will encrypt data at rest and requires an encryption key to read data outside of the device.
Access Controls: Implement strong access controls to limit who can access customer data. These would include role-based permissions and the use of two-factor authentication for systems that provide access to client data
Regular Backups: Maintain regular backups of your data to ensure recovery in case of a breach. These backups should also be encrypted at rest, and if sent to the cloud, in transmission.

Data Breach Response

Incident Response Plan: Develop a comprehensive incident response plan to address data breaches promptly. This should include who to contact if there is a suspected breach, any external resources to be engaged, and how to isolate and remediate the incident.
Notification: Notify affected customers and regulatory authorities in case of a data breach. The notifications will vary based on locale and regulatory compliance and should be vetted by your legal counsel to ensure you are following all necessary steps while also protecting yourself.  
Investigation: Conduct a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the breach and take corrective action. This would be a part of your incident response plan. Most often, SMBs will need to contact an external firm to do a deep forensic look at the incident and provide remediation recommendations. Firms such as an MSP with cybersecurity professionals on staff would be an excellent partners to have on hand for this type of specialized work.

Compliance

Understand Regulations: Familiarize yourself with relevant data protection regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Each will include specific guidelines relevant to your particular industry. If you get breached and are not following these guidelines you could incur additional fines.
Conduct Regular Audits: Conduct regular audits to ensure compliance with data protection laws.  These include some sort of ongoing cyber security auditing process to ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements.
Employee Training: Provide employees with training on data security and privacy best practices. If there is one line of defense I think is most vital, it's your employee training. Teaching them the importance of secure data handling, how to spot potential incidents or attempts to compromise the systems is at times, the last line of defense before an active incident.

Third-Party Vendor Management

Due Diligence: Conduct due diligence on third-party vendors who handle customer data. For those with regulatory commitments, like HIPPA, your vendors should be able to issue you documentation verifying their own regulatory compliance.
Contracts: Require strong data security clauses in contracts with vendors. This should include their commitment to your regulatory compliance requirements.
Monitor Performance: Regularly monitor the performance of third-party vendors to ensure compliance.

Privacy by Design

Integrate Privacy: Build privacy into your business processes from the start. This might include how you segment data, hide any PI data via encryption or hashing. Disallowing the writing down of any PI data or removal of files from the systems or physical files is essential to protecting client privacy. This could all be documented in your company security policies
Consider Privacy Implications: Consider the privacy implications of new technologies and practices. Again, most vendors should provide you with their regulatory compliance commitments in what’s called a BAA which is an agreement from the vendor to your business that they uphold necessary compliance requirements.

Customer Education

Inform Customers: Inform customers about your data privacy practices and how their data is protected. Most often this is included in a privacy policy provided to your clients. This will provide clients with insight into what types of data you collect and retain on their behalf.
Provide Transparency: In your privacy policy, be transparent about how you collect, use, and share customer data.

By following these best practices, you can help protect your customers' data and maintain their trust in your business.