From my experience, business growth isn’t just about hitting bigger numbers; it’s about expanding your reach, building trust, and creating impact beyond borders. The digital era has made that possible like never before. While everything seems too wonderful, data security breaches are quite common if not properly addressed.
Today, we store everything from passwords to client details and other sensitive data online and even a small mistake can cost financially and ruin the company’s reputation. Growth teams, while scaling fast, often overlook this threat and put a lot at risk. However, using smart and strategic approaches can easily save them. What are they? We will read them soon!
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Potential Risks To Data Privacy While Scaling Fast
If you are a growth team worker and want to safeguard your team from data privacy breaches, it is very important to identify loopholes first. Once you identify the major factors hampering your data privacy, it will be easier to address the crisis!
1. Limitations of Cloud Storage Services
Growth teams working in companies, especially startups, don’t have many data storage solutions on their own. So, either they have to hire third-party vendors for managing cloud storage or manage it in-house. In both scenarios, data privacy remains at stake because of various reasons, like data exposure or mishandling of data.
So, even a slight mistake by either the vendor or data mismanagement by office staff can lead to data theft. If your growth team is not thorough with cloud storage or is unable to identify the problem within a time, you might end up exposing your sensitive data like passwords, credentials, transactional information, etc., to cyber criminals.
2. Unregulated Internet Source
Another major reason for data privacy breaches lies in the very source that helps growth teams to scale up – the internet. Several growth team professionals, like designers, data analysts, engineers, etc., work remotely in companies.
While many of them might be using encrypted internet sources, there are still chances that a few workers might use unprotected internet sources from public places or while travelling, etc. In such cases, there are high chances of data breaches that might affect your connected devices and end up exposing data to cyber criminals.
There could be more reasons for data privacy breaches other than these, but these two play a major role in data privacy errors for growth teams.
Hacks To Maintain Data Privacy While Scaling Fast
Now, it’s time to know about solutions! While most of the information is stored in digital format, it is crucial to safeguard not just data and devices but also the source of data transmissions. The following strategies include a comprehensive plan to protect data privacy at a large scale.
While scaling the business involves a lot of people and workflow of handling tasks, including data, growth teams can simply follow these hacks to minimise data security breaches.
1. Centralise Your Customers’ Data
When business expands, data also increases. In the case of global-level scaling, there are high chances of scattered information, sensitive data stored in multiple devices, etc. Thus, data privacy becomes more crucial.
To tackle such a problem, growth teams can adopt a compatible Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to bring all data under one platform. Thus, centralising data will reduce the data privacy leakage at several levels. Moreover, this way they can track and even automate their workflows efficiently, without compromising on data privacy.
2. Limit The Storage Of Data
Instead of having tons of data, it’s better to limit it because the more data you have, the more data privacy breaches could happen. Growth team professionals usually have a lot of data because of the nature of their job requirements.
While some of these data are important, not all information is worth saving, especially if it has already fulfilled its purpose. In such cases, it’s better to declutter data when you are done with it. Having less data is easier to manage, track, and protect than vast anonymous data. Moreover, you won’t have to outsource data storage and can save money that can be used to further scale your business.
3. Use Reliable Internet Sources
Mostly, growth teams use reliable internet sources, but when they scale up and include remote workers, internet sources can be compromised. So, it is always better to either use an encrypted internet service or a VPN, especially for those who are working remotely. Since VPNs protect IP addresses, they can protect data from external cyber threats efficiently.
In fact, it is also smart to use a reliable Mac or Windows VPN within the office premises to browse anything on the internet. It will mask your IP address, won’t let others track your activities, and protect your data.
Final Words
For growth team professionals, scaling up the business and protecting data should go hand in hand. Since digital crime and fraud are increasing day by day, a well-planned and smart approach is more than necessary.
This problem can be minimised by using a reliable internet source or a VPN connection, monitoring data breaches and fixing them immediately, decluttering obsolete data, etc.
