Data is something that accumulates on a daily business in any organization. Since this needs to be well organized and managed, efficient and timely data entry is indispensable. To avoid expenses related to data management requirements in-house, outsourcing to a third party is a good alternative. A good partnering firm will organize and streamline the data processing needs of your organization. To fulfil the duties of the service provider, they would need to access proprietary data, personally identifiable data and other regular data. You need to make sure of data safety and security while granting them access to your confidential information.
How Data Breaches Occur
People have now become very concerned about the data breaches that lead to theft and misuse of personally identifiable information and financial loss. The following are the various breaches that can occur when outsourcing to a data processing service provider.
- Lost or misplaced backup tapes
- Hacking
- Lost or stolen computers
- Online exposure, which is another form of hacking
- Insiders who are dishonest
To prevent these security issues it is very important to choose a reliable third party for data processing. It is important that the senior executives, security and compliance team are present when selecting the vendor and all details should be verified and monitored throughout the process. This will help to avoid unnecessary pressure on the employees and the vendor.
Choosing a Reliable Data Entry Service Provider
Following are some guidelines that can be followed while choosing a vendor.
- Obtain references from other customers who have already chosen the same vendor
- Verify the copies of any independent audit
- Appraise the vendors that are heavily vested in your industry. Usually, their knowledge of industry rules is proportional to their exposure in that industry
- Verify all the security infrastructure and procedures including
- Failovers
- Disaster recovery plans
- Personnel hiring practices
- Network firewalls
- Data handling
- Red flag policies
Watch out for any significant staff change in the information security, IT or compliance department.
Effective Data Security Measures
Here are some ways in which a reliable outsourcing company would ensure data security.
- Protection from any threat: Use of antivirus, live protection and web protection that will help them to prevent potential risks, attacks or threats.
- Data encryption: Important data may be shared via disk, removable storage and email. A good provider would ensure strong security via complete encryption, recovery and policies regarding security breach.
- Prevention of data loss: This can be ensured via advanced in- built solutions. Content scanning and a complete set of sensitive data type classifications can be incorporated into threat detection machine to enable immediate protection of your business data.
- Security control: They will build up an IT environment that is highly secure by identifying the possible causes of infection and avoiding any instance of such infection.
If you want to prevent compromised data, the selection of your data entry company must be done very diligently. Ideally, the data entry company you select must follow the same stringent security standards you may have. It is best that your executives are educated on the necessity and significance of data security so that they can also support the outsourcing company selection process.
