In this article, Ritesh Sanghani, a Director with Hi-Tech BPO Services in India, discusses keeping outsourced data safe.

Selecting the apt outsourcing data entry provider is vital to getting the task completed successfully. But the critical aspect is; whether you are into information technology, product development and research, content marketing, business transcription, social media marketing and customer service, apprehension about security.

It is appropriate to have such apprehensions as you are providing confidential information and granting them access to your system; making it all the more important to take care of safety apprehensions.

Major protest towards offshore outsourcing has been that jobs are being directed overseas, where delicate personal information is passed on creating severe threat to Americans. U.S. companies who are trying to protect their customers from the likelihood that their personal information will be tainted by employees of a Foreign Service provider.

People who reside in the U.S. have become more dreadful of these breaches in data privacy that has impacted identity theft due to the fact that many television and newspaper coverages have highlighted some of the incidents including hackers targeting 40 million credit cards of a U.S. based bank, main security breaches at a reputed U.S. organization and a bank and the loss of financial information for 3.9 million Citigroup customers by United Parcel Service.

With such instances happening around the U.S., businesses and consumers are at risk while providing private information that is available to thousands of workers in India with the help of data entry outsourcing.

Various security breaches that data entry outsourcing faces when they give access of their data to outsourcing companies:

• Hacking
• Dishonest insiders
• Exposure online - another form of hacking
• Lost backup tapes
• Lost and stolen computers

Various provisions of prevailing Federal statutes that address the privacy issue in two different types of sensitive types of information: medical records and financial records.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) talks about medical information privacy issue.

• HIPAA constraints on how patient’s medical can be utilized by health plans, hospitals and others demarcated as covered entities also called as pharmacies.
• HIPAA also encompasses the transmission of facts irrespective of whether it is written, orally or electronically.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA) talks about financial information privacy issues.

• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA) focusses its attention on financial data privacy issues.
• GLBA provides privacy in three broad ways: the Financial Privacy Rule, the Safeguards Rule, and Pretexting.

Aforesaid acts also would prove productive enough when the organization are aware of the pros and cons, & ask the four security questions before opting for an outsourcing data entry provider:

What security measures do you have to ensure that your data and business is secured?

This is one of the significant factors that even surpasses the question of quality. The provider’s security needs to be strong with complete encryption, recovery and policies concerning security breach otherwise it will not be effective. Lawfully when privacy is gone - it is gone forever. Technical and legal features are a part and parcel of privacy and security particularly in this age of cloud computing. One needs to recognize where your company stands and then compare it with the provider’s policy.

What capability do you have in service delivery?

Outsourcing when combined with offshoring gets intricate with the state-of-the-art progressions in technology. You require a provider who is experienced enough to distinguish operations and eventually enhance value to your company. The only reason for outsourcing is not to keep the costs down. It is important to note that you are depending on industry experts heavily. Do not settle for anything less.

What kind of support can I anticipate?

It is critical to note that customer service in outsourcing providers indicates that your contracts are positioned flawlessly and wide ranging. You have right to use real time support, particularly when communication is critical to keep business flowing efficiently and they also have emergency policies regarding outages that we cannot control.

What is your disaster recovery retort procedure?

This is crucial. The cruel veracity is the system for outsourcing any operation is not foolproof. It is susceptible to human and more often than not, technology blunders. The cloud is more susceptible for crash. It is very important to absorb these policies pertaining to disasters or outages and measure the strength of their recovery retort.

Commence with a risk evaluation, find out the possible business impact if the procedure goes wrong and access whether outsourcing is the right way to go ahead. Remember the bigger the risk, the more evaluation that is required to be done with the potential supplier. It is very significant to comprehend how the outsourcing supplier is working and understand their working pattern.

Alldrick, a principal advisor with a prominent consultancy in the U.S, quotes "It is important to carry out due meticulousness on site. You should work with the outsourcing supplier’s people to comprehend about their processes and evaluate the company’s controls embedded in its procedures whether it is procedural or technical. It is important that whenever any employee leaves their ID card is reallocated and what controls lie behind it. Is it possible to get answerability for any user ID for any given time as that is what it is there for?"

Reputed computer hardware software companies located in the U.S. took charge of information security for their database. They took into consideration HIPAA and GLBA while developing a product that assists them from security apprehensions. It was found that there were three things that motivates information security strategy including the things you‘re required to conduct by law, the operational procedures and procedures you put into place, and last but not, the least technology tools that you utilize to get the job done.

Enlisted are the various layered protection measures the company utilized for their data security:

Encryption:

The company shares data very conveniently with the assistance of a demonstrated full-disk, removable storage and email encryption. With the help of their in-built solution they can now impose policy-based encryption for PCs and mobile devices for mixed environments.

Threat Protection:

The company has an antivirus, live protection and web protection which enables them to provide solution that proactively finds out zero-day dangers and reacts swiftly to attacks.

Data Loss Avoidance:

One of their in-built solution helped them to provide state-of-the-art and simple solution for data loss prevention. They assimilate content scanning into threat detection machine and include one and all-inclusive set of sensitive data-type classifications to enable instant protection of your sensitive data.

Security Controls:

It is possible to develop an IT environment which is highly secure for your company by taking into consideration the bases of infection and averting instances. With the help of the in-built solution by the company you can get network access control, application control, device control and file type control that assists in curbing threats.