Keeping Data Security as Top-of-Mind Saves Time and Money!

In the past few years, there have been enough data breaches in the news to convince us that we don’t want to be there. The bad reputation will cost you in current business and seriously impair the prospects of gaining new business — and that is all on top of the millions of dollars in immediate cleanup costs. Marketers are taking notice. In a recent survey, 51 percent of respondents cited security concerns as the top reason their companies delayed the acquisition of marketing technology.

This makes sense. Taking reasonable steps up front to ensure good security certainly saves time and money down the road and puts your company in a much better position to prevent problems, react to new vulnerabilities, and lessen the impact of any breach or suspected breach. The right marketing-platform provider will help you to form a secure foundation for your marketing efforts.

Security Compliances Should Be the Keystone of Your Secure Foundation.
Best-in-class companies use security programs that establish a baseline or model for them to use and follow, with guidelines that come in the form of security controls that enable you to establish and follow a process that regularly searches for, identifies, and addresses potential risks.

These protocols go a long way toward streamlining the process of adopting a digital platform. For example, after reaching our Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) compliance, I was on a call with a customer who said, “All right, tell me about your security program.” I replied, “Sure, we just achieved FedRAMP compliance, and we’re working toward SOC 2 (service organization control 2) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization). We don’t feel that those are going to be very difficult because FedRAMP was such a high bar.” The customer said, “Oh, you’re FedRAMP compliant? Okay, I don’t have any further questions regarding security.” We’ve since added SOC 2 and ISO 27001 as well as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). From a security perspective, we’ve seen that having those compliances up front goes 80 or 90 percent of the way toward providing customers with the marketing solutions they need.

A Good Partner Helps You Guard the Perimeter.
No security program is perfect. Perpetrators are continuously developing their skills and finding loopholes, making security an endless battle. Open communication about security compliances and practices is critical at every step in the vendor relationship. You’re putting trust in that vendor to handle your solution, and you don’t want to risk that they may be compromised or that you might be part of a compromised solution in the future with them.

When looking at vendors, it’s important to find ones that are transparent in their security, meaning that they’re willing to discuss and disclose, to allow for auditing, to both walk through and talk through what they’re doing for security — and even to discuss their various shortcomings, acknowledging no security program is perfect. They also should have the capacity and willingness to create custom security features based on a client’s needs.

It’s also important for the vendor that you’re using to have a real structure in place to address security situations as they happen. Having a good security model in place allows you to identify threats and react to them quickly, significantly minimizing — or altogether avoiding — any damages.

Here’s an example of how this can work. We once had a customer who noticed some anomalies happening within his environment. He knew the first step was to contact our internal security team, so he initiated the process, and we set up a war room. We engaged all the potential parties that would be able to help influence and affect the systems. By immediately going in and addressing the irregularities, we were able to ensure that nothing was compromised. Even though we found a vulnerability, we were able to isolate it, mitigate it, and address it before a breach actually occurred.

Bottom Line
Knowing that the vendor and customer both want to ensure everything is as secure as possible — and having that kind of openness — is really beneficial to establishing a secure digital foundation. It helps keep customer data safe; it helps with user experience; and ultimately, it helps with building and maintaining customer loyalty, reducing legal fees, and increasing the bottom line. It all comes down to the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Follow this link to learn more about how a digital foundation leads to digital success.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/keeping-data-security-top-mind-saves-time-money/