Maintaining data security and ensuring the prevention of data loss are key concerns that most businesses have when considering their outsourcing options. Indeed, Cloudstaff can assist with these challenges.
Outsourcing is experiencing significant growth and is being widely adopted by many industry sectors in different regions around the world.
For large companies and enterprises who likely want to adopt the outsourcing model, there are some notable data security concerns that need to be understood and overcome first.
We have helped hundreds of companies move to an outsourcing model. We have the knowledge and experience to share with your business that can guide you in overcoming any outsourcing data security challenges.
Successful outsourcing is being fueled by next-generation outsourcing companies that empower cloud technology, enabling organisations to reduce their total cost of ownership, increase flexibility of their IT implementations, and become more competitive while meeting the ever-increasing time to market.
While the move to the cloud is clearly providing enormous business benefits, Data Residency and Data Security remain the top concerns of every business that considers making the cloud a part of their outsourcing strategy.
The main concerns with Data Residency are as follows:
- Who manages and has access to the data?
- How will you know when data is breached?
- Where is the data being stored and which region’s laws apply?
- What happens to the cloud-based data when a service is terminated?
The two key technical methodologies that will address your Data Residency concerns are the implementation of Data Encryption and Data Tokenization. Your outsourcing provider should be fluent in both approaches and should be able to speak to the pros and cons of each.
Simplified explanation
Data Encryption:
- Encryption is the mathematical process of converting clear text data into ciphertext which can then only be read by the customer who retains the encryption key.
Data Tokenization:
- In tokenization, the “actual” data resides locally in a token database. Tokens are then randomly generated and associated with the data before it will be sent to the cloud. Once tokenized, the data can then only be read by the custodian of the token database.
There are significant differences between tokenization and encryption. It is worth taking a moment to look a little deeper and understand every detail.
What it protects
Data Encryption:
- Data encryption will equally protect your data against both internal and external threats. This is because there is a segregation of the duties between where the keys are being managed and where the encrypted data is being stored.
Data Tokenization:
- Tokenization will only protect your data against external threats. This is because anyone within your organisation or your outsourcing provider who has access to the token database can still access the clear text data.
Examining the hardware requirements of both strategies is interesting, too.
Hardware requirements
Data Encryption:
- Data encryption usually only needs lightweight stateless servers with no additional data storage requirement.
Data Tokenization:
- When tokenizing data, the token database will grow fast. High-capacity servers and databases are usually needed. Extra operational oversight is also required to manage what has and what will become a mission critical to the database.
It is important that data security, privacy, and sovereignty issues are addressed by your Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) provider while you are in the early phases of investigating your outsourcing options.
Thanks to today’s technology, secure internet and storage options can be deployed by Cloudstaff, leveraging both the tokenization and encryption methodologies.
This means that while your Cloudstaff team members are physically located in the Philippines, they look, feel, and act like they are sitting with your local team just in the same room.
Join hundreds of companies across a multitude of different industry sectors that trust Cloudstaff to securely manage their outsourcing staff while addressing their Data Residency and Data Security needs.
Related articles: