Big data security guidelines that insurance organizations need to know

Today, the landscape of the insurance industry is transforming at a faster pace as digitization is evolving. All the traditional business processes in the insurance business are abolishing as the modernization has hit the era like a sack of brick.

As technology is helping every industry to grow, you might be wondering how technology is impacting the insurance sector. Well, to be honest, earlier, insurers had cluttered offices with papers everywhere and gathering data from flying papers and other sources was indeed devastating. But with the advent of technology, big data came into existence and insurers found it quite useful.

With big data, insurance firms can easily collect data from different sources or process like policy management, commission management, claims management etc., enabling them to analyze and maintain the entire data seamlessly. Big data has to be helpful for customer-centric firms like the insurance industry to touch the areas, which were uncovered before and deliver better services.

It is expected that the growth of big data in the insurance sector will grow rapidly in the coming years. However, we should never forget that every coin has two sides, similarly, big data offers ample opportunities, but also increases security concerns because online data is so much more vulnerable to cyber attacks.

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That’s the reason technology experts researched further for an appropriate solution to overcome such issues and it seemed impossible to them. But today we’ve the right report in hand explaining major big data security protocols that will help insurers to stay stress-free while taking help of big data:

1. Establish a secure way for deploying big data in your insurance firm

This is the first step that will enable you to set a platform for the data results. If you fall short to implement this process, then you can be the victim of hackers. Spare some time to deploy the big data system in your insurance business securely. Following are some step that you can take into consideration:

Embrace big data cryptography to enhance encryption standard

Over the years encryption has developed and with the arrival of big data it has become more intricate than ever. You just have to do install SSE (Searchable Symmetric Encryption) or something similar to it for conducting seamless searches on encrypted data. Once you install this, you can utilize any of the below-mentioned encryption methods in your insurance firm:

  • Attribute Encryption Based- This can be utilized for the integration of access controls into encryption
  • Identity Based Encryption- In this, you can use plain text, which makes your key management process a lot easier
  • Converged Encryption- This tool help cloud providers to detect duplicate data by using keys

Introduce granular access control

Make sure that you introduce granular access control in your insurance business by analyzing, which level of management requires more data, giving each employee individual ID and passwords. So whenever they are in office they can access the data and once out of office there’s no way to access the data. This will help you to stay on top of your big data security concerns.

Always train employee regarding Big Data privacy standards

Being an insurer, it is important that you explain your employees during their induction about big data and its privacy standards. This is the another way to protect your data from hackers. You as an employer, should aware your employees about the policies and what are your expectations from them.

Utilize secure programming frameworks

Don’t put yourself in chaos when it comes to choosing the right secure programming frameworks in big data. There are thousands of big data frameworks along with its level of risk, so don’t stake your data at any cost. To minimize your liability, always make sure that you to take some preventive measures to protect your framework and avoid personal data violation.

Think out of the box to stay on top of security

Hackers are becoming sophisticated in their skills. That’s the reason; even insurers should become pro in securing their data to beat such hackers. Many a times you might think of big data security, but you leave it then and there as you have other priorities. Just imagine, if you could have spent that moment with your insurance team discussing the issue you would have gotten an appropriate solution.

Consider an outsourcing insurance services or hiring a security team, whichever is suitable. The advantage here is that when you outsource your non-core activities, you free up time to concentrate on other critical tasks.

More so, you can also hire third-part network security and data testing team that can help you perform a penetration test. In this, a certified organization act out the same methods and technique that a hacker might use to access data of your company. Further, you can address all the probabilities of hacking and stay one-step ahead of the hackers.

2. Focus on your VPN for secure transfer and access of data

Insurance businesses usually interact with clients via the internet, and transferring information online can be easy, but risky as well. In the earlier days of big data, many insurers and security managers discovered the level of risk involved while transferring personal information of clients online. This threat drift agency users towards the use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to handle all the important factors of big data.

A right selection to VPN helps you by routing your connection through an external server, thereby hiding the actual location, add on to this it encrypts the data so that hackers or government surveillance are unable to use it even if they get access to it. From over viewing the information to editing to transferring it use VPN. There should be no ifs.

3. Keep a hawk eye round the clock and perform security optimization-

The best way to ensure whether your security practices are working or not the way it should is to spot downtime as it happens. More so, keep a hawk eye on unauthorized accesses or any other alerts to safeguard your insurance business from hackers.

Bottom line: 2019 is the high-time to take preventive measures against big data breaches in your insurance business as the competition is increasing day-by-day. You cannot afford to lose your business out to competitors because of such security negligence. Embrace the above-mentioned guidelines to set a right path for your team.

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