Finding out who you can trust is a crucial part of being a business leader. Over time, you determine who is reliable and who may not have your best interests in mind. You identify who you can hire, who you can partner with, and who other established business leaders are in your community. Trust is woven into practices that help protect businesses and the public alike. There are many data protection standards depending on your industry, but some of the most common include HIPAA and Protected Health Information (PHI) within healthcare, as well as Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for financial firms. Regardless of your industry, these regulations and standards help ensure that sensitive information and data are well protected.
Trust also extends beyond common business decisions, something as small as clicking on links in emails and downloading files are acts of confidence you do each day, making the positive assumption that malicious actors aren’t at play. But what happens when this trust is breached? An innocent link could lead to a malware attack that debilitates your organization.
The same goes for choosing who maintains your organization’s data. By working with less-than-secure firms, your data can be at risk without you even knowing. We’ll share why it’s important to store your data on a secure platform, and additionally why it’s important to work with technology partners who look out for your best interests.
Trust and data go hand-in-hand
Your data is one of your organization’s most important assets. Customer or client documents, financial records, employee history and records, and other secure information are all part of what makes your organization tick. Losing that information can lead to devastating consequences. Internal effects of a data breach or malware attack can bring your business to a grinding halt, forcing all of your time, money, and resources to be poured into remediating the situation and getting back your data. For small to mid-sized businesses, this can be completely draining, and worst case, cause long term damage or closure.
Trust is important between you and your clients and customers, and there can be a detriment to those relationships if there’s a data breach. If your business lends itself to storing your customers data, you may be contractually expected to limit the liabilities for yourself and your customers through an indemnification and hold harmless agreement. Lost or stolen customer data can lead to a breach of this agreement, and also have consequences for your organization. Even without this legally binding agreement, if your clients are directly affected, they may be encouraged to terminate your relationship in order to protect themselves. Even if many of your clients are unharmed, they may still lose valuable confidence in your services, which can take time and effort to earn back.
Security and confidence are also some of the most important aspects of entering into a long-term partnership with a technology provider.
Who can you trust?
Many organizations can say that they’re reliable and secure, but it can be difficult to verify, and when your organization’s data is at stake, you can’t make that decision lightly. By working with a trusted partner to help you store your information and help you migrate to the Cloud, you can feel confident that your data is protected.
PiF’s customer data always comes first. When we started out in 1996 selling digital document storage and retrieval solutions, we were at the forefront of new technology, and even 26 years ago we took the security of customer data very seriously. As times have changed and opportunities for growth have presented themselves, PiF Technologies has invested in additional outlets to best serve our customers and prioritize efficiency, simplicity, and security.
As cyber threats have increased and the need for secure data has grown, we’ve developed internal procedures and programs to reinforce security and have established ourselves as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Partner. We also meet SOC2 compliance standards to ensure that our security requirements are in-line with top-performing organizations across the globe. While any organization can claim that they have strong security standards, SOC2 allows them to clearly demonstrate that those standards are being upheld.
What is SOC 2?
SOC 2 is a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations, developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), which specifies how organizations should manage customer data. Its main purpose is to establish trust between service providers and customers, it validates the claims the organization makes regarding the protection of customer data.
The standard is based on the following Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
A SOC 2 report is tailored to the unique needs of each organization. Depending on its specific business practices, each organization can design controls that follow one or more principles of trust. These internal reports provide organizations and their regulators, business partners, and suppliers, with important information about how the organization manages its data.
Rather than create their own processes and standards, organizations can follow clear criteria that allow them to review, assess, and validate a common set of security and operational controls through SOC2. It levels the playing field so organizations regardless of size or scale can all meet and uphold the same standards.
These standards, alongside our commitment as an Amazon Web Services Cloud hosting partner, clearly communicate to customers and the public alike that not only do we “talk the talk” for security, but also “walk the walk.”
What is the Cloud?
Cloud Computing is the practice of using a network of remote network servers hosted via the Internet to store, manage, and process data. In simple terms, the Cloud is a group of data centers that are available to users over the internet.
For organizations that are still remote or hybrid, the Cloud can help maintain a streamlined work environment, no matter where your employees work. When data is stored completely on-premise, it’s inaccessible to employees who aren’t on your network. This can cause processes to slow down with employees needing to download and send files back and forth, or wait until they’re in the office to access certain data. Users can access their files anywhere they have an internet or LTE connection and on any type of device (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc). This means your organization can provide flexibility to your employees to work from anywhere.
Enhanced security with Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the largest providers of Cloud computing services in the world, with over 90% of Fortune 100 companies working with an AWS Partner. Many of PiF’s customers have moved to the AWS Cloud in recent years, with that number continuing to grow as organizations see the value of a secure, flexible Cloud infrastructure.
Unlike other Cloud providers who define a region as a single data center, AWS Regions consist of multiple Availability Zones consisting of discrete data centers with identical power, networking, and connectivity abilities, and each housed in separate facilities to ensure the Cloud is always secure. This means that even if one data center is compromised, your data is backed up to other data centers and still protected.
AWS has strategic security designed with protecting your organization’s most important assets in mind.
Prevent
Define user permissions and identities, infrastructure protection and data protection measures for a smooth and planned AWS adoption strategy.
Detect
Gain visibility into your organization’s security posture with logging and monitoring services. Ingest this information into a scalable platform for event management, testing, and auditing.
Respond
Automated incident response and recovery to help shift the primary focus of security teams from response to analyzing the root cause.
Remediate
Leverage event-driven automation to quickly remediate and secure your AWS environment in near real-time.
AWS is designed to help your organization build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for your applications. World-class security experts monitor AWS’s infrastructure and also build and maintain their security services.
Work with PiF as your trusted AWS Cloud Partner
The first step in moving to the Cloud is consulting with us, we’ll help walk you through the process and identify next steps. We then identify the first workload to start testing in the Cloud, focusing on a development and test environment, website and non-production servers as a first project. We’ll install the AWS Application Discovery Service on some of your on-premise servers to collect statistics which then will allow us to determine approximate costs and total cost of ownership.
We’d love to help you discover how AWS can protect your organization and simplify storing your data. Schedule a demo with us using the form below to have a conversation about your needs and how PiF can help.
