Data Protection: What Matters the Most in the Business

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

Amid all these how the business has been carrying out has also 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 their business, the business process outsourcing is on a tremendous climb, over the past years, as it offers greater operational flexibility to boost the business functions such as,

• Creating space to focus on core features like customer relations, developing products etc.
• Enabling the access to high values and skills
• Cut down in cost
• Improved quality of services
• Accessibility on new features of the technology
• Quicker 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 boarders of the home country. BPO is mostly deemed “offshore outsourcing”. That is the contract is sent to another country. A UK Company partnering with a BPO vendor located in Philippine or Sri Lanka is an example for 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 among all is that the privacy or security of the data can be compromised if lost, copied or brought to a competitor. The data theft happens either by hacking from a remote place or information is stolen by employees.

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

Develop and Adopt the Best Practices

Developing the best practices that fit the company’s policies that cater to internal security plus network security will itself be a strong step to commit itself for data protection. By this, it is not only Company’s commits itself to data protection while ensuring compliance to their clients.

Developing best practices helps companies to,

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

Control Over Employees

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

Control over technology

Working in compliance to 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 over cloud

The term “Cloud” is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet (From Wikipedia).

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

• Encryption of data
• By having a defined and enforced data deletion policy
• Add 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 is shown a tremendous growth over the years and will reveal the growth in future too. BPO Industry has significantly altered the changing scenarios in the Industry.