If you’re in the market for an Investor Relationship (IR) CRM platform, you need to focus on security. This platform will be a goldmine of information, containing critical internal information about your financials and personal information collected from your shareholders.
If you don’t ensure this data is secure, there’s a chance you could expose critical customer and proprietary data.
A data breach can make a considerable dent in your reputation, causing your stocks to plummet as a result. But more importantly, you could face considerable legal consequences if your lack of security is the reason behind the breach.
Security and privacy laws tightly regulate the financial industry, and any organization found breaking compliance might have to pay hefty fines or settlements.
To protect your brand and budget, you should research investor relations firms thoroughly, comparing their security policies just as carefully as their analytics. Here are some of the things you should expect from your IR tech provider:
Encryption
Encrypting all traffic in transit and data at rest is a bare minimum measure of security. Your IR service provider should use the latest cipher suites to ensure the highest level of encryption. For added transparency, they should share how they store this data. If using third-party data farms, they should be industry-leading service providers with physical protection defending servers and infrastructure.
Accreditation
An IR service provider will design its privacy laws and security protocols to match industry-level regulations. You want to look for a firm that has an ISO (International Organization of Standards) certification. An ISO 27000 proves your IR CRM follows the best practices set by the information security management industry.
Another certification to look for is the System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC-2) Type 2. This third-party certificate compares an IR service’s data handling to its five trust service principles: security, availability, processing, integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Only those that meet their high standards for intrusion detection may boast such an accreditation.
Security Compliance Audits
Cybersecurity is an ever-moving benchmark. That’s why it’s essential an IR firm performs regular audits to ensure their security controls are adequate. The best IR service will perform internal audits on their own and hire third-party security firms to assess, monitor, review, and improve their design.
Penetration Testing
A penetration test is a simulated cyberattack that analyzes how well security stands up to application- and infrastructure-level attacks. It serves two main purposes:
- It demonstrates how well the current security protocols stand up to an attack.
- It reveals any potential vulnerabilities that a hacker could exploit — allowing the firm an opportunity to patch these issues before they expose data.
Bottom Line: This Is Just the Start
Encryption, accreditation, security compliance audits, and penetration testing are just some of the ways an IR service protects your CRM data. Although they should be standard, not all IR tools come with this level of security. Nevertheless, there are other ways to improve security and lockdown data.
The only way you can ensure your IR service meets or exceeds these standards is by doing the research. Taking the time to review privacy and security policies will help you protect your proprietary data, customer information, and your brand.
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