E-mail is a cornerstone of business communications, and obtaining your customer’s email address is a privilege that allows you to personalize your marketing efforts and learn details about your target market and gain insight that might otherwise be difficult to obtain. How do you assure your customers that their email address (and all the other information they share with you) is secure?
Right now, Sony is busy doing damage control over the security breach that occurred on the PlayStation 3 that let user information, including credit card numbers, escape their grasp. Last month, many financial institutions and retail stores were scrambling to reassure customers and apologize for a breach that occurred when their email company, Epsilon, was compromised and hundreds of thousands of names and email addresses were stolen. While only names and email addresses were accessed and not credit card information, there was a lot of placating to do to reassure uneasy customers. The month before that, Play.com admitted that their email provider had experienced months of irregular activity before revealing that their customers email addresses had been accessed and compromised.
As a business, ensuring the security of your internal email as well as the information you maintain about your customers has to be a primary concern – something you think about doing before there’s a risk for a breach. The question is, can you really create an environment that provides you with the security you need to offer the reassurance your customers and your investors want? It’s a matter of choosing the right hosted e-mail service that provides you the best possible security.
Here at thinkCSC, we have biometric security in place that ensures that only certain people can access the data center and firewalls. We run regular backups, but our backups are completely encrypted, so even the information stored on our back up server is safe from harm. Even if someone were to break in and physically steal our servers, the thieves would not have access to anything because all of the information on it is encrypted. We’ve literally locked out the hackers from the get-go.
We can actually run a piece of software from your location that encrypts your data before it is sent over the internet. When it gets to our site, even we can’t access it unless we have that encryption password. Most of the time, we are taking care of your whole network environment, so we will be the ones managing that password, and we have layers of security protocols in place that keep you protected. But we can also provide you with complete control, and can set it up so you’re the only who has the password.
The choice is simple: you’re either aggressively protecting your customer’s information by having the best email security available, or you’re preparing a letter to your customers to apologize to them after their information was stolen.
