Collecting data is an important part of every business that operates in the modern world. Protecting said data is even more significant. You certainly want to keep your customers’ information safe, especially if they are inputting their credit card numbers and similar data.
This is why data breaches, as explained on this website, are probably the worst nightmare of every single company out there. If you leave the information vulnerable, you are basically putting a target on your back. That can lead to some rather unpleasant attacks, which will ultimately affect both you and your customers.
People who are not that informed about data breaches might not be aware of the dangers of such a situation. If you haven’t had to worry about this in the past, then you are either quite lucky, or you have done everything it takes to be properly protected. Whatever the case might be, you most certainly don’t want to worry about this in the future either.
Well, if you don’t ever want to face those unpleasant and dangerous situations, you will need to protect your business against data breaches. Before we get to explaining how to do that, though, let us first check out why these attacks are dangerous and how they can impact your company negatively. Here we go.
1. Financial nightmare
First things first, you have to understand that data breaches are a financial nightmare. Regardless of the size of your customer database, exposing their confidential information can be extremely expensive for your business. There are quite a lot of factors that make it expensive.
Here’s what these breaches actually are, in case you aren’t sure you understand everything: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/obligations/what-data-breach-and-what-do-we-have-do-case-data-breach_en.
As I was saying, there are a lot of factors that make these attacks expensive. For starters, there are regulatory fines and legal fees that you would have to pay. Then, there are also expenses related to improving your security after a breach, as well as PR expenses that will occur in your effort to save your reputation.
On top of it all, the revenue you will lose is unmeasurable and it is actually the biggest hit that your business will have to deal with. A certain portion of customers is bound to take their business elsewhere in the event of a data breach. Simply said, they’ll lose trust in you and they’ll stop using your services.
2. Brand reputation
I have briefly mentioned this above, but it definitely deserves some more attention. Businesses depend on their reputation. If your brand is recognized as ill-reputed, you are highly unlikely to get many customers. After all, nobody is going is going to choose ill-reputed companies over reputable ones.
Date breaches can seriously affect the reputation of your brand in a negative way. No matter how hard you have tried to make sure that you have a stellar reputation, one issue with information security can undo it all. Consequently, your whole business will suffer and you will hardly, if at all, be able to restore your previous brand reputation. That’s why using the right IT services to protect you is of utmost importance, but we’ll get to that later.
3. Consumer trust
Your customers will provide you with their personal information, such as phone numbers, addresses and credit card info, and they will expect you to keep the info safe and private. As long as no breaches occur, they will keep trusting you. Consequently, they will keep using your products and services.
If, however, you end up dealing with a data breach, you will not only lose revenue as mentioned above, but you will also lose customers, since consumer trust will certainly reach an all-time low. Recovering from that is rather difficult and it is sometimes even impossible, especially when smaller and newly established businesses are in question.
How To Prevent Breaches
Now that you understand just how important it is to protect your information against any possible attacks, thefts and dangers, you will probably want to ensure that nothing like that happens. When you become aware of the dangerous after-effects of data breaches (such as those explained on this useful source), you become all the more interested in safeguarding all the information you possess. The only question is how you can do that.
Well, there are quite a few methods that work towards protecting the information, but here’s the most important thing you need to know. If you want to make sure that every single piece of data is perfectly safe, you will need to hire an IT specialist that could take care of all your technological needs. Without the right professional on your side, you will hardly be able to achieve the goal of protecting the information.
That basically means that you will have to find the right company that works in this field and entrust their experts with your technological needs. Now, the only thing is, you’ll need to be pretty careful when choosing those companies. That’s not because there aren’t a lot of companies offering the services, but specifically because there are.
As the risks connected to data breaches have been made clear, I am sure that you will want to search for the right companies to hire right away. That’s a pretty great decision. Yet, as I have mentioned, you will have to be careful, which means that you will need to know exactly what it is that you should take into consideration in order to find the right IT company for you. If you are still unaware of the risks of these attacks, you can find out more at https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-advice-for-small-organisations/understanding-and-assessing-risk-in-personal-data-breaches/.
Basically, the most important thing to take into account is the reputation of the companies you decide to work with. In addition to that, you should also check how experienced specific providers are. Those are the two most important elements to keep in mind when trying to decide which IT expert to hire, so make sure you check that before making your decision.
