September 2020 - Point North Networks

How Consumers View Business Data Practices

A recently released report presented the results of a survey of American consumers to chart their attitudes and expectations regarding corporations and their data privacy. This report—which was compiled by advisory firm KPMG and is available for download on their website—outlined the primary privacy concerns of the everyday user and discusses the statistics around the issue.

Overall, the results showed varying levels of awareness amongst these users and made a few shared concerns very clear. For instance:

86 percent of respondents to the survey felt that their data privacy was a rising concern.

70 percent claimed to be “generally familiar” with how companies collect their personal data, while 64 percent were familiar with how it was used and stored, 63 percent say they understand how it is protected, and 57 percent say they know how it is sold.

Having said that, 68 percent don’t trust these companies to sell this data ethically, 54 percent don’t trust it will be used ethically, 53 percent don’t feel it will be collected ethically, and 50 percent don’t trust these companies to protect their data sufficiently.

Most consumers are concerned about the theft of their social security number, with 83 percent of respondents identifying this concern. Following closely behind come the 69 percent worried about their credit card numbers.

Surprisingly, only 16 percent are concerned about the theft of their medical records.

How Consumers Treat Their Own Data Practices

Now, while this sounds promising (if not quite at optimal numbers), this concern isn’t reflected in consumers when their own actions are considered. While many—in fact, the majority—of users stated that they would consider it risky to engage in many online behaviors, like repeating passwords across accounts, using public Wi-Fi, and saving a credit card to a website, over 40 percent did these things regardless.

This study also took note of the fact that many users neglected their own security options… 61 percent, in fact.

What This Should Tell Us, as People and Business Owners

Whether you’re considering your own personal data, or you’re thinking about the data you’ve collected as you’ve done business, security needs to be your highest priority. Harvard Business Review Analytic Services conducted a study of their own, and the results were quite telling.

46 percent, essentially half of surveyed consumers, said that they had stopped doing business with a retailer due to discomfort with their privacy statement.

That’s huge. As a consumer, it only shows how much power can potentially be wielded to help improve security for everybody… and how much responsibility that power gives us. As a business, it’s a wakeup call to how important securing data really is. While comprehensive data and information security isn’t a simple process and will ultimately make some of your internal processes more time-consuming, it is better than alienating half of your market.

Fortunately, Point North Networks, Inc. can help make the adoption of improved security solutions and procedures far simpler. To learn more about what we have to offer to help ensure your data security, give us a call at 651-234-0895 today.

If there’s anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught businesses, it’s that they need to be (or, in too many cases, should have been) prepared for anything. Disasters don’t keep a nine-to-five schedule, and you generally won’t get much notice that one is going to strike. This is why it is so important to have fully considered your business continuity, and to have prepared your staff to work productively from anywhere.

First, let’s examine the various disasters that your business may have to contend with.

Business Disasters Come in Many Forms

As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Unfortunately, in this case, the “cat” is your business and its operations.

There are plenty of reasons that you could find your processes interrupted. There are those relatively small frustrations, like an employee being out sick or a workstation demanding a restart at the least opportune time, with an entire spectrum of increasingly bad situations leading up to unmitigated disaster… think your office burning to the ground, or a worldwide pandemic forcing businesses to close for weeks on end.

You know, just to name a few examples.

While these situations all have varying degrees of severity, it is important that you have a plan for each to enable your operations to continue. This is what is known as business continuity.

Traditionally, we usually discuss business continuity in the context of data loss and extreme weather events. However, it has never been more clear that this is not the extent of what makes business continuity so necessary. We are now all first-hand witnesses of the importance of business continuity planning that doesn’t assume that there is anything inherently wrong with the office space or the business’ resources, and instead acknowledges that the human element may be the problematic factor.

When it comes to threats like viruses, businesses should be concerned about all kinds–those that infect computers, and those that infect users. Both need to be addressed in business continuity plans.

How to Address Business Continuity in Terms of Illness

The idea of business continuity is simple: maintaining an acceptable level of business processes, despite some negative consequences that would prevent them from being possible, without proactive planning and preparations. It’s having a playbook, so to speak, of how to survive assorted issues and disastrous circumstances.

While the natural approach is to focus on those events that would impact your business in terms of its operability, with some discussion of lacking human resources, recent events have made it abundantly clear that the opposite also needs to be true. How would your business cope if half of your workforce (or more) suddenly couldn’t safely stay in the office and work for health reasons?

This needs to be a part of your business continuity planning, especially because it’s a very new situation for so many businesses.

What Your Illness-Based Business Continuity Plan Needs

Let’s briefly talk about the components that need to be involved in your continuity plan:

The Means to Be Productive: As your team members attempt to work from home, you need to ensure that they are capable of still fulfilling their responsibilities. To accomplish this, they are going to need comparable technology solutions to what they are able to access in-house. This can be accomplished through a few means. You could equip your team with laptops that they can take home and work remotely on, with the solutions they need either delivered via cloud services or installed on the device itself. Alternatively, you could also enable them to access their work resources on their own devices in an adapted version of a Bring Your Own Device strategy.
The Means to Remain Secure: Whenever your team operates remotely, it is important to remember that they are not within the protections you’ve established within your network, and are therefore susceptible to additional cyberattacks and other threats. This makes it important that you not only provide them with the tools they need to help maintain an acceptable level of security–like a virtual private network, firewalls, and antivirus–but that you also educate them on the best practices they should be following.
The Means to Communicate and Collaborate: Finally, just because your team will be working from home does not mean that they shouldn’t still be working together. You need to make sure that they have sufficient means of communicating with one another. Provide them with solutions like Voice over Internet Protocol solutions, conferencing tools, instant messaging, and email, and make sure they are trained to use them when it is appropriate to do so.

If your business technology is making it more difficult for you to operate with all that is going on, reach out to Point North Networks, Inc.. Our team of professionals can evaluate your needs, design the solution that best addresses these requirements, and provide the support needed to maintain it. Reach out to us at 651-234-0895 to learn more.