This article describes five reasons why you should be concerned about fraud and data protection. If you are involved with payments in any fashion, then this has got to be old news to you. Likely what’s more helpful is the explanation of the benefits of focusing on the protection of data:
“No Data, No Problem!
One way to reduce the possibility of payment card details and consumer info from getting into the wrong hands is NOT to process or store the data! Just like the Thai restaurant mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, the owner chose NOT to accept cash payments, therefore reducing the likelihood of monetary loss due to a robbery.
However, NOT processing or storing payment card details and consumer info means that many businesses would have to change their business model, outsource to another company, or go out of business.
In most companies around the world, data is the top asset for their business, second only to their employees. Since data is imperative to keeping businesses running and feeding the services they build in order to compete, the best course of action is to use the data on hand and collect even more data, while taking the critical steps to ensure all of it is protected and kept private.
Nothing creates greater friction between a company and its consumers than a data breach. Having to send the ‘letter of data breach notification’ to all customers affected and managing a data breach incident is expensive, time consuming ,and a major distraction from innovation. It is also highly injurious to your brand and a major destroyer of carefully earned customer trust.
Data security, when implemented with effective data protection methods, actually enables organizations to access and extract more value from their data stores. Departments need to exchange data to function, but this process can be held up by the risk of exposing private identity information. With data-centric security, this is no longer an issue because properly secured data can be analyzed, researched, and used to run test scenarios and answer customer queries all while the data is still in a protected state.
Data-centric Security focuses on protecting the data itself
The ‘data-centric’ approach to data security may be the much needed shift many business leaders should consider for protecting and privatizing payment card details and consumer data. The data-centric approach focuses primarily on:
- Protecting data at its earliest point of entry
- Revealing the data only when necessary
The main advantage with the data-centric approach is that data is secure throughout an enterprise, no matter whether it is in motion or at rest. If a business critical workflow or a customer-facing department needs the original data, a request is made for access to the original data. The request is also audited, which complies with regulations and laws requiring documented access to critical data.
With the right approach, data security reduces risk to private data, which benefits you and your customers. Check out this white paper to learn how data-centric security can simultaneously fulfill the requirements of multiple data protection standards and regulations.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group