Data security firm Bitglass has cautioned small to medium businesses (SMBs) of the perils of Black Friday on November 29.
The company’s CTO, Anurag Kahol, said: “Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday present a great opportunities for retailers to collect customer data that can be analysed to provide insight into buyer behaviour. However, while ramping up efforts to collect this data, it is even more important to store it safely in order to meet data privacy regulations.
“While complying with data privacy laws can be particularly challenging for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the demands for SMBs are still the same as larger companies and they must take full responsibility for securing their customer data.”
Kahol said there is no excuse for negligent security practices such as leaving databases of customer information exposed. The consequence of failing to protect sensitive data can result in massive fines, not to mention the resulting damage to brand reputation.
“SMBs should focus on flexible, cost-effective solutions, that can prevent data leakage; for example, cloud access security brokers (CASBs) that provide features like cloud security posture management (CSPM), data loss prevention (DLP), user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA), and encryption of data at rest. Only with these types of capabilities can an SMB be certain that the data it is storing is truly safe.”
