Recently, our office, along with other floors in the same building, was burgled. Luckily for us, it was during the early hours of the morning when no one was in. On our floor alone, we had 6 laptops, along with other IT equipment stolen.
Having my laptop stolen, combined with the recent cyber-attacks, around the world, has brought it home to me the importance of keeping data safe. In our case, all laptops were encrypted so there was no data breach.
Encryption is not new. We have been doing it for hundreds of years to protect business or trade secrets. In days of old, encryption largely relied on cryptography on paper moving towards the likes of the Enigma machine in World War Two. Since then, things have moved rapidly, now using the powerful algorithms and codes that computers can produce.
Whether your business bank payment system is on premise or in the Cloud, the challenges are the same. In the Cloud, however, encrypting and securing data is even more critical. The good news is that government regulations and compliance policies require that organisations protect and maintain encryption keys in accordance with strict regulations. HSBC, for example, will provide one pair of keys to work with a third-party banking solution which can produce an organisations own pair of keys in the industry. Similarly, Microsoft Adobe and Amazon also offer services around BYOK (bring your own key). BYOK, enables maximum control and trust between the data owner and cloud provider, and is considered a best practice for internal and external compliance controls.
It is critical that businesses protect payment data from the start to the finish of the payables process – or be at risk of fraud or hacking.
Implementing a solution like B4B EFT from Professional Advantage is a step in the right direction. Key data is encrypted within the solution and it also offers the ability to encrypt your payment file all the way to the bank using PGP Encryption and a paired key model with your end bank so data is encrypted both in transit and at rest.
The big question to ask yourself, is how important is it that you protect your payment data? Having had my laptop stolen with potential access to bank accounts, my answer is do not procrastinate!
Learn more about B4B eBanking here.
