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Business process outsourcing is a popular concept, so much so that the top Fortune 500-1000 companies prefer accessing such solutions. However, despite this engaging and awe-striking recognition, businesses fear outsourcing their services to business process outsourcing companies, especially countries like India or the Philippines.
Their concerns include the risk of data stealing, mishandling, and cybersecurity. Most BPO companies follow strict data compliances regarding data security, but protecting such data takes more than mandatory practices.
True that business process outsourcing services are huge cost-savers and offer quality services to their clients. Organizations are always very curious about how BPO companies handle and segregate data and ensure security. Several companies believe that BPO companies can put their data to risk instead of mitigating it.
Before we get any further into why data security., we must understand why organizations must invest.
Data security refers to protecting, safeguarding, and securing confidential and private data of imperative importance to business proceedings and structure. Today’s business landscape bends on the digital end of the market. While digital media is easy to access and consume, users generate a tremendous amount of data in this generation and consumption cycle. This data is of enormous importance to organizations, so they analyze and store it in databases.
However, when we store data on databases that aren’t secure enough, it makes it extremely vulnerable to hackers, cyber-attacks, unauthorized data access, data theft, data alteration, etc. Data breach impacts organizations, looting millions and billions of dollars. As per IBM, over 52% of all data breaches were malicious outsiders’ actions, 25% by system glitches, and 23% by human error. Consequently, compromised credentials and cloud misconfigurations lead to 19% of data breaches.
Customers’ personal information comprises 80% of all data breaches, mostly recorded as lost or stolen. Conversely, PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is the most often guarded form of data by data protection regulations.
For business process outsourcing companies handling client data, establishing a safe harbor for it is very imperative. It would help if you entrusted the clients that their business process outsourcing services can efficiently handle such personal information. When a client allows a BPO company to access a company’s sensitive data, they want to be confident they the latter is more than equipped to take care of such information and have strict data security measures and policies in place. Consequently, companies need to implement stringent data security measures in their processes to ensure it happens.
The market views the Business Process Outsourcing industry as a red sign for data breaches, mostly due to wrongly deployed security regulations, unauthorized access controls, inadequate data regulations, and more. Moreover, with new technologies like AI, ML, and RPA in action, more customer indulgence and surmounting data generation is a given. It is why organizations need to adapt and strengthen their data security corridors before any data-related mishaps happen.
Hiring offshore business process outsourcing companies is not a new business norm, but it is a concerned one. Some clients know about data breach implications. Corporations today are a big no to data breaches and demand strict data security policies from their vendors and expect them to follow global BPO rules and protocols. While this might result in major-money-input required for improving customer management, data retention, data transformation, all these costs are short-lived. Plus, it helps secure a BPO’s reputation as a data secure one in the market.
More so, 100% data security is one of the biggest attractions of any BPO company. They can take care of all your data entry, management storage, processing, and more, offering excellent services in return. You get experienced and expert people on board, take care of your business’s private and sensitive information, improve your organization’s architecture, gain efficiency and accuracy in the process, and reduce service costs.
All in all, BPO companies keep your data secure and private, nullifying all the business stakes. So, when you’re looking for BPO services, you must know how to judge their indulgence and if they threaten data security.
For business process outsourcing companies, data security is like the Holy Grail. They need to frequently better, improve and increase their security measures. They must protect client data at every cost and employ experts that know how to do so.
The following are some points detailing how BPO companies handle data security and enforce it.
Tending to the physical data assets is easy. On the contrary, it is also the most misunderstood and underestimated vertical by BPO companies. Installing an on-premise surveillance technology is one way to discourage unauthorized employees from accessing data that isn’t statured to their level.
It requires a role-based data access model in place. That means companies should grant access controls to personnel allowed to obtain it. Several data breaches occur due to employees’ data mishandling, which a BPO company can easily ward off. Another bold move is to employ in-depth background checks of newly hired and existing employees, educate them about the perils of cyberattacks, and prevent them from practicing illegal activity. Such actions refrain from intentional and unintentional data theft or access.
Leaking communication lines lead to several data breaches. More so, since offshore business process outsourcing companies work in different time zones, a constant communication network forms the basis of seamless interaction between parties. Expert cyber attackers can take advantage of these channels, loot confidential information, and steal data from within the organization. If a company has a flawed data encryption model in action, it can lead to irreversible and devasting results.
Using a proxy can also greatly enhance data security. Everybody knows that they help users browse anonymously but they also encrypt transaction details so that prying hackers cannot gain access to this information. This is vital for any company trying to keep their data to themselves and not fall prey to cybercriminals.
To prevent any such disaster, BPO companies must invest in software and tools that encrypt data, secure communication channels, and optimize data storage at all times. More so, it should raise red flags if any alarming or unusual activity is detected. Investing in business process outsourcing services like firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spam, etc., is an ideal solution.
Marketing your security compliances is a great way to let your clients know you’re stocked and packed with data security. If you comply with security standards and have a good track record, educate your consumers about the same. Regular updates about imposed data integrity and regulations assure customers that their data is in good hands.
Customers adore proactiveness. Portray yourself as a trustworthy and reliable custodian of sensitive data. Implement robust and efficient cloud-based virtual unified threat management that provides firewalls, intrusion detection, anti-virus, anti-spam, and data prevention. Enforce DDoS detection and mitigation solutions that secure data that access them. All of these solutions are feasible and easy to deploy.
To ensure the smooth and faultless working of the software and tools used, always keep an IT team on standby. Companies today exercise several technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the cloud, etc. Hence, having a reliable and learned IT team, handling all the hurdles, and solving obstacles is a blessing. The team’s job is to keep the systems up and running at all times. They should prevent any machine failure and retrieve all the client data in case of a breach. They must also ensure no loss or theft of data occurs.
Business process outsourcing companies must always certify the latest ISO standards and follow all their clients’ guidelines and standards. The ISO certifications translate to the level of security.
All computer systems used in a BPO unit need continuous 24/7 monitoring. The IT team can find, detect, and eliminate malpractices automatically. All policies set up restrict all unlawful actions resulting in data leakage or file copying into the problematic files.
As per Grand View Research, the global BPO industry is at $343.3 billion by 2025. Hence, the business process outsourcing companies need to maintain their stand as the economic driver. The BPO industry needs to handle all contemporary data security issues for its clients to do so. If a company places trust in their business process outsourcing services, it must be worth their time, data, and money. For that, BPO companies can follow stringent data security practices, uphold compliance with user privacy, and assure clients of their data’s safety.
