How a CDP ensures that customer data is secure at every step of their journey

Doing business successfully in 2024 requires getting the most out of your hard-won customer data. Enabling conversational interactions and ensuring secure engagement requires unifying all key information into a single repository or customer data platform.

With your business depending on it, protecting this data becomes a key priority.

Your immediate concern may be the financial cost of a data breach, but there are many more reasons to take data security extremely seriously.

Building trust: Customers are far more likely to share zero-party data with a business if they know it will be used responsibly and stored securely. Trust is the foundation of strong customer relationships and data losses will instantly kill any that has been built up.  

Ensuring the integrity of the data ecosystem: Key to success in an ever more data-driven economy will be to successfully participate in data ecosystems that transcend individual businesses. Trusted business partners are increasingly sharing and connecting data from different sources for given use cases, to deal with missing or anonymized data, and to support sophisticated predictive analysis models. Businesses that don’t have adequate data security will be excluded from these consortiums.  

Reputation in the market: Just as important as customer trust is a company’s reputation in the marketplace. Negative PR related to data breaches will deter investors and might limit a business’ ability to raise capital. Implementing stringent data security practices will do the opposite and enhance credibility.

Competitive advantage: Where two businesses are competing to win a contract and are equal on all other measures the one that can clearly demonstrate their commitment to safeguarding data will most likely win.

Cost savings: By securing their customers’ data, companies will reduce churn, increase positive recommendations, and avoid the hefty regulatory fines related to the misuse of data. The medium and long-term benefits of implementing an effective data security strategy far outweigh the short-term costs.

Effectively securing your customer data is far from a box ticking exercise. It requires a comprehensive strategy that considers and mitigates all risks across all your business workflows and at every customer touchpoint.

It is said that customer data is like gold dust, but it is not the kind of treasure that can be locked away in a vault. To realize its true value and potential it must be used in every beneficial way. That means collecting and unifying customer data in a CDP (Customer Data Platform) that can help to:

When talking about securing data in the overall eco-system of a business, we need to consider the three forms that data can take.

We can then look at the types of threat and how to mitigate them effectively for each type of data.

This threat covers unauthorized individuals gaining physical access to servers, storage devices, or networking equipment. The risk is significantly reduced in the cloud storage model as servers are located in purpose-built data centers which have the highest level of access controls and on-the-ground security.

In the case of malicious attacks from outside the data center, for example the cutting of power lines or the sabotage of cooling systems, providers will work closely with local law enforcement and security contractors to reduce the risk. They will also have thorough contingency plans in place to minimize downtime in the case of an incident.   

This covers threats to data that is in the process of being transmitted over the internal network, the internet, or during transactions and integrations with third-party systems. Strict access controls, multi-factor authentication, and data encryption are the key tools for mitigating network access threats.

Malware such as viruses and ransomware are a significant risk to organizations that don’t have adequate preventative measures. Once introduced to a network they can spread through emails, social media, or automatically in the case of more sophisticated attacks. A combination of robust and up to date virus protection and education of employees are the best ways of protecting against malware attacks.

Stolen or lost hardware that contains confidential data has historically been a significant risk that has been hard to mitigate. Adopting a cloud storage model where no data is physically stored on connecting devices and stringent access controls are in place is the best way of preventing physical data loss.

Denial of service attacks are when bad actors attempt to disrupt or bring down a server, network, or service by overwhelming it with internet traffic, usually using botnets installed silently on host computers that can then be controlled by the hackers. This prevents customers from accessing data and services and can cause significant financial and reputational losses for affected businesses. Cloud providers will have sophisticated monitoring in place to catch these attacks early before they have an impact on operations.

Working with a cloud service provider to host your customer data gives you all the benefits of centralized data security, accessibility from anywhere and any device, and savings on hardware and maintenance. Reputable cloud service providers will also have stringent data security strategies and will work with you to ensure your customer data is secure at all stages.  

Some key best practices include:

Work with a certified provider: By choosing a provider that has achieved industry certifications, for example ISO 22301 and ISO 27001, gives you the peace of mind that they offer the best available secure data storage, encryption, and access controls, and that their products and services align with the most recent information security best practices.

Use strict authentication: Using passwords alone significantly increases the risk that hackers will be able to access your customer data. Implementing multifactor authentication where a password is required in conjunction with a code sent to a registered mobile device will significantly reduce the risk. Other options include biometric authentication using facial recognition, fingerprints, or iris scans.

Encryption: Encryption and data masking are the most important tool for ensuring data security, especially when information is being transmitted over the internet or data network when it is more vulnerable to being intercepted. Cloud providers should be able to offer encryption services for data that is being imported or automatically updated through API integrations, and data that is being stored. For example, even if a pen drive was inserted into a server, no data would be read or transferred.  

Least privilege model: By adhering to a least privilege model or taking a zero trust approach ensures that users only get access to the information they require to do their job and prevents hackers from exploiting weak links within your organization to get access to confidential data.

Understand shared responsibility: A cloud service provider should help its customers to understand the role they play in ensuring the integrity of their own data. No matter how secure the storage and processing phases are, customer staff need to play their part and adhere to authentication and security procedures.

Monitoring and reporting: Constant monitoring by both AI and trained humans, and regular audits of the entire environment will flag anomalies early and show any unauthorized access attempts.

Service-level agreements (SLAs): Work with your provider to draft SLAs that align with your own business goals for uptime, responsiveness, and technical troubleshooting availability.

Our customer data platform People CDP is trusted by some of the world’s top brands to unify and use their data to create better customer experiences and save on costs.

Data security is a fundamental part of the design of People CDP which ensures that your valued customer data is safe at all stages:

In addition, People CDP is both ISO 22301 and SOC 2 TYPE 1 certified, giving our customers peace of mind that their data is protected according to the highest industry standards.