When choosing a professional monitoring center, it’s crucial to understand how your customer’s data will be handled and stored. Customers trust you with sensitive information and it’s your responsibility to keep it safe.
Without the proper precautions, your customers could be at risk.
Choose The Right Data Storage Options
Data storage refers to how your customers’ alarm information is managed. Two of the most common storage options are cloud and on-premises. When data is in the Cloud, it’s stored remotely with a provider, like AWS or Microsoft 365.
Conversely, on-premises storage, or “on-prem” for short, refers to an on-site data center with physical hardware and servers. Regardless of where and how your data is stored, it’s important to understand what physical and digital protections are in place.
Safeguarding sensitive information requires a multi-faceted approach.
“Bad actors” come in many forms. It could be an outside organization spreading malware through scam emails, or perhaps it’s an individual within your company who is trying to access sensitive data for their own gain.
Mistakes can always happen, even when your staff is regularly trained to spot red flags. Bad actors play off human emotions like fear or empathy to elicit a response or a click. One wrong move could put data at risk. Having a robust data management strategy ensures that your company remains protected at all times.
Data Encryption
Strategic planning gives you an opportunity to prepare for every possible scenario and put protections in place to safeguard sensitive data. Data encryption is an important step in building a digital barrier against bad actors.
When data is encrypted, the content gets scrambled into a secret code which makes it unreadable to the average person. There are many effective ways to do this but AES-256 is just one example of a strong encryption standard that companies can use to safeguard sensitive information.
It’s important to rotate encryption keys regularly, about every six months. This ensures that even if data is intercepted, it remains indecipherable without the appropriate key.
Always Have A Backup
It’s vital to plan for the worst-case scenario and build a strategy that protects your company on all fronts. Even the companies with the highest level of security can falter. To minimize the impact on your business in the event of an attack – keep immutable snapshots, or “write once, read many” (WORM) files. These snapshots create unchangeable copies of your data, preventing malware from altering or deleting critical customer information.
Versioning creates and securely stores multiple backup versions of files. This allows businesses to quickly restore data to a previous state, minimizing downtime and data loss.
Access Control
Prevent important data from falling into the wrong hands by granting security access only to those who need it. To determine who in your company should have access, and at what level, many organizations use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which restricts access based on job function.
Access must always be kept up to date to ensure former employees are promptly removed from servers when they leave the company or change positions.
Use Strong Passwords
Always use strong passwords with a minimum of twelve characters. Be sure to add numbers and symbols to make passwords more complex and difficult to guess. As a general rule of thumb, passwords should be changed regularly, especially after turnover to prevent disgruntled former employees from attempting to regain access.
Implement Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds a secondary level of verification to ensure that the person logging in is, in fact, a verified user.
Your IT team should closely monitor data access and event logs to ensure unauthorized users are not able to access your data, or that employees are not attempting to log-in on unknown devices.
Physical Security Measures
You can implement the best possible digital security strategy. But, if physical protection is not in place, your company is still at risk of an attack. Data should be stored in a secure location with multiple layers of access control, including badge access, or better yet, biometric scanners, to keep out unauthorized parties.
Only essential employees should have access to restricted areas. To ensure maximum security, data centers should be monitored 24/7 by surveillance cameras. Hiring security personnel to directly oversee these areas can add an additional layer of protection should any other security measure fail.
Our Commitment
We make it our mission to utilize the most advanced physical and digital security measures to keep your customers’ data safe. Our data is stored on-prem within fully secure and redundant bicoastal facilities. These data centers utilize the latest technology from some of the world’s leading vendors. Maintained by an expert on-staff IT team, our server technologies are upgraded proactively and optimized for speed, performance, and adaptability.
It’s important to not only take security measures within your business, but to ensure that those you partner with are doing the same. With sensitive data moving through a monitoring center, security protocols – both physical and digital – are vital in creating a solid defense against data leaks.
What protections does your central station take to protect your customer’s data?
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A strategic partnership with Rapid Response means your data is stored at a secure location, with a data management strategy that ensures maximum security.
