Protect Privacy and Protect your Brand

Security of data has long been an issue for organisations around the world. Pundits say it’s not a matter of IF but WHEN any given company will suffer a data breach or attack. As catastrophic as it may be at the time, businesses do survive data breaches, despite the damning headlines and the punitive fines.  Notable examples are British Airways and Marriott Hotels.  British Airways was fined £20m by the ICO for a data breach that took place in 2018, and in the last couple of weeks BA has announced that they have now settled compensation claims: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57734946

Similarly Marriott Hotels was fined £18.4m for a breach that involved over 500m data files.

While both brands are in the travel industry, which is suffering due to the pandemic, neither saw a notable downturn in consumer sentiment toward them as a result of the breaches. Both have apologised to customers and put measures in place to mitigate further risks.

The Embarrassment Factor

What really kills a business is when something is leaked that is toe-curlingly embarrassing.  Something that cuts to the core of brand values, shows an organisation as dishonest, or not respecting their customers or the general public.  Depending on your age, the famous Ratner moment may spring to mind.  This is when Gerard Ratner claimed that the Ratners high street chain of jewellery stores sold ‘crap’. Previously loyal customers felt under-valued and taken for fools.  They deserted the brand in droves, the business lost significant sales and had to completely rebrand.

PA Consulting lost major government contracts as a result of losing an un-encrypted USB stick containing details of 84,000 prisoners. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7575989.stm

More recently, the Tory government, and Boris Johnson in particular, took a knocking when disgruntled ex-Spad (special advisor), Dominic Cummings decided to dish the dirt. He had the saved WhatsApp messages to prove his point.  (Ex-employees that take sensitive WhatsApp conversations with them is another demonstration of why consumer-grade apps should not be used in business – the organisation can’t control the data https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/19/dominic-cummings-tells-bbc-that-pm-denied-covid-would-overwhelm-nhs)

Protecting Privacy

Protecting your employees’ individual privacy, and the commercially sensitive and valuable information that they may keep on their mobile devices is a very good reason to use a secure comms app such as those offered by Armour.  Depending on your job, losing data can be inconvenient if it needs to be retrieved, costly if it is of a commercial nature and results in lost sales, extremely costly if it is intellectual property or trade secrets, or, if you are someone from the covert/intelligence services world, a journalist, aid worker or activist working in an unfriendly regime, it can be life threatening.

Protecting the privacy of your customers or citizens is equally important, particularly, as we have just discussed, to protect the brand value and public image of your organisation. Quite apart from the requirements of GDPR, protecting personally identifiable data is a worthy goal in its own right, as the distress and inconvenience its loss could cause an individual is immeasurable.

How a Secure Comms App can help

Providing an app like Armour® Mobile, or SigNet by Armour®, for your employees to use for business conversations, be they voice, video, conference or messaging, or sharing sensitive documents, helps employees to become more security aware. The apps have great usability (something our UX designers have worked hard on), so there is no learning curve to get people to use them, ensuring swift user adoption by the user community. The organisation is in full control of its data, and when an employee leaves, their account can be deleted, along with all of the data held in their account.

Using an enterprise-grade secure comms app sets the tone, and leads by example, so that employees understand that data security and data privacy is something that needs to be taken very seriously. It protects your staff, protects their privacy, the privacy of your customers, and ultimately may save your brand from an embarrassing ‘disgruntled ex-employee dishes the dirt’ moment.

For more information about how Armour Comms can help your organisation to keep control of your data and protect privacy, contact us today or view our latest podcast below.

Our Latest Podcast – Privacy V Security: https://youtu.be/IeeBvl2XJAc