5 tips to keep sales data secure in the cloud

Melissa is 31. She visits your online office products store, on average, twice a month. You have her credit card number, email, address and mobile phone number. She prefers text reminders about your annual one-cent sale. Oh, and she's a neat freak. She has downloaded all 16 articles your marketing department posted on office organization.

Melissa is unique, yet her customer journey is one of hundreds of thousands tracked in your CRM (customer relationship management) system stored in the cloud. How do you fiercely protect her information?

We've all seen what happens when protection fails. Target Corp.'s famous red bull's-eye logo bruised black and blue when cybercriminals compromised consumer data. More than 70 million customers were affected, followed by a $10 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit. Subsequent consumer distrust was immeasurable.

And if it can happen to them, it can happen to just about anybody.

There's a lot, however, businesses can do. While startups may not have the volume of data to warrant CRM in the cloud, mature small businesses and aggressive growth mid-size companies do. According to Trackvia.com, CRM technology increases revenue by 41 percent. It makes sense why companies hungry for growth rely on CRM to nurture customer relationships.

As architects of Salesforce solutions, we see companies start out with a dream; when that dream takes off, data grows exponentially. Consider this: Doctors access your information via computer. So do your banks, your children's schools and your favorite online retailers. All that sensitive data is aggregated in a big data repository - a virtual file cabinet with data streaming in from multiple sources, access controls, and data security compliance issues. CRM data demands integrity, accuracy and security. People's lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Practice these expert tips to keep your sales data secure in the cloud:

1. Plan Carefully. Start by asking questions: Who is accountable for data security? Who's running big data requests? Who's controlling data mapping and user access based on specific jobs? What happens when an employee leaves? What is our access by hierarchy? What are our permission policies? Plan and document policies for data access controls, compliance management, reporting distribution, and authorizations.

2. Develop a Strategy In Advance for Data Loss Prevention. Identify your data discovery and classification approach. How are you organizing information? Is it separated by department? Is there an internal library or systematic way to access information? Think of it like a house. You wouldn't put everything in one room. That wouldn't make sense. Same goes for data.

3. Lead with Data Security. Look at every touch people have with data. When a large financial services client engaged us to perform an assessment of its existing Salesforce implementation within their virtual card division, we addressed security and compliance considerations, from the company's email relay to sign-on policies to web services and integrations. Optimize your CRM system's data security features. For example, Salesforce sends alerts for phishing and malware attempts. And using a Salesforce-supported browser employs server authentication and secure encryption to ensure relevant data is available to registered users.

4. Understand and Monitor Big Data Clusters. Audit logging technologies give real-time data monitoring - with a trail of computer events. Run reports regularly instead of waiting until end of quarter to discover there's a problem. Information about the use of the system can be critical in diagnosing potential or real security threats.

5. Establish a Disaster Recovery Plan. Not having a recovery plan is like finding out you have no fire extinguishers after the oven catches fire. What kind of recovery initiatives do you have and how are you backing them up?

The big take-away from our extensive experience of implementing the No. 1 CRM platform is that documentation is everything with accountability for information a close second. Circling back to Target's data debacle demonstrates this: the fallout included appointing a chief information security officer, documenting an information security program, and offering security training to "relevant" workers.

Good news: Follow these tips and you are miles ahead in protecting not only customer data, but the most important part of your business - the people behind the data, your customers.

• Kimberly Johnson is the Salesforce Architect Sales Executive at Aeoflex Technology Group, with offices in Barrington and throughout Chicago. Contact her at (312) 656-2944 or Kimberley.johnson@aeoflex.com.