Zurich Insurance has recently been fined £2.3m by the Financial Service Authority (FSA) for losing personal details of 46,000 customers.

According to the BBC report, the information went missing during a routine data backup to their data centre, and the company was ‘oblivious’ to the loss until a year later.

The FSA stated that Zurich UK had failed to oversee the outsourcing arrangement effectively and did not have full control over the data being processed by their data centre.

Your data is one of your most valuable assets. Having it fall into the wrong hands could have devastating consequences, particularly if it contains confidential customer information.

Many companies now use some form of web-based CRM system to manage prospect and customer information. But who else can access this information, or what happens if the provider goes out of business?

As more prospect data suppliers move to online systems, some of them are putting their customers at serious risk by having their prospect software written and managed by third party companies, who can easily access confidential client data. What’s more, what happens if either the data provider or the third party software company goes out of business, or the two companies have a trading disagreement? Suddenly your business could be left “high and dry”.

Customers who subscribe to the Insight database access data via Salestracker, Insight’s own web-based CRM software. The software is written and managed by Insight’s in-house software team under strict security guidelines, and customer data is stored separately within a high-security data centre in London, with a mirrored back-up system for disaster recovery purposes. The database is protected by a host of security and firewall systems.

Protecting your data is a serious matter. You don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, and you don’t want to be left exposed if your data supplier or their software provider have a disagreement or cease trading.

Choosing a financial strong and stable company such as Insight Data, who have developed their own software in-house and who take your data security very seriously, will ensure your data is both secure and accessible at all times. Other data providers may provide a cheap solution, but is it worth the risk?

For more information on Insight Data visit www.insightdata.co.uk, call us on 01934 808293 or follow us on www.twitter.com/insightdata