New research from Kaspersky Lab shows that the average cost to small-to-medium sizes businesses in the United States and Canada has reached record highs.
The company found that data breaches now exceed $140,000 for SMBs (up 36% from 2017). Most of the cost comes from the need to quickly upgrade infrastructure and software, but there are hefty fines if the data that was compromised included credit card data. For enterprise companies, the costs are even greater, with the average data breach cost being $1.75 million on average.
There are many different layers in protecting your company from a data breach, one of which is shoring up the protection of payment data in Accounts Receivable.
Many companies over the past 10 years have started the move to vault-based payment data storage, with tokenization of the actual credit card numbers to help protect sensitive information, but a large percentage of the market has yet to move to better technology to prevent breaches.
Just recently, we wrote a blog speaking about TLS updates, which helps provide better security at the server level with encryption of sensitive information. Here are 5 quick tips for protecting your customer credit card information:
- Maintain PCI compliance
- Use encryption for all sensitive data
- Use a PCI-DSS certified vault for all credit card storage
- Consult with trusted experts
- If a breach does happen, deal with it immediately
If you are interested in learning how to protect cardholder data, contact APS for a free consultation.
