Data Protection: What Matters the Most in the Business

It’s a brave world. Everything has become very different, innovative and challenging.

Amidst all this, the way a business operates has also been reformed from conventional to suit the current economy, infrastructure and the global needs.

Given the fact that the world is focusing on a non–core operational module for businesses, the business process outsourcing industry has been on a tremendous climb, over the past few years, because it offers greater operational flexibility to boost business functions such as:

• Creating space to focus on core features like customer relations, developing products etc.
• Enabling access to high values and skills
• Lower costs
• Improved quality in services
• Accessibility of new technological features
• Quicker and more accurate reporting
• Improved productivity
• Swift reassignment of its resources where necessary

The breadth of business process outsourcing operation can be within or outside of the borders of the home country. BPO is mostly deemed “offshore outsourcing”, which means the contract is sent to another country. A UK Company partnering with a BPO vendor located in the Philippines or Sri Lanka is an example of offshore outsourcing.

While outsourcing can help many companies to strive to improve their processes and boost profits, it also contains certain shortcomings. One of the biggest being, privacy and data security can be compromised if information is lost, copied or bought over by a competitor. Data theft happens either by hacking from a remote place or if information is stolen by an employee.

Strict adherence to information security policies and procedures would help BPO companies overcome the potential data security threats the in following ways:

Develop and Adopt the Best Practices

Developing the best practices that fit the company’s policies that cater to internal security and network security, will be a strong step towards committing itself for data protection. This will ensure compliance with their clients.

Developing best practices helps companies to:

• Constantly monitor business functions and continuous assessment
• Evaluation and improvement of information security measures to match the industry standards
• Foreseeing possible vulnerabilities and threats
• Prevent information loss or theft

Control Over Employees

• Signing non-disclosure agreements with employees and letting them know about the potential risk associated with the data security
• Blocking internet access wherever it is not necessary
• Preventing employees from carrying information through means such as paper, USB, mobile phones or any other recordable devices
• Creating a paperless environment also helps to prohibit people from bringing devices to the office premises, which would prevent data security breaches

Control over Technology

Working in compliance with the below will help data privacy in BPO companies:

• Using appropriate software to block any attempts made to download or copy files/ data from the company’s system
• Prevent unauthorized access to systems/files /folders to help any data losses

Controls if your data is in cloud storage

“Cloud is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.”- Wikipedia

Information security concerns are getting critical each day. It has become a complying requirement to include the client’s environment in the risk management process of  BPO companies such as:

• Encryption of data
• Having a defined and enforced data deletion policy
• Adding protective layers of data security by having access control, segregation of duties within an organization
• Insisting companies to go through the rigorous compliance certifications

Due to numerous advantages, the BPO industry has shown tremendous growth over the years and will continue to grow in future too. The BPO industry has significantly altered the changing scenarios within the businesses.