Company data consists of internal information regarding a company’s behavior, characteristics, qualities, and tendencies.
Company data can describe a company’s current market position, identify trends, predict consumer behavior, and recommend actions based on the data, allowing organizations to determine their business strategy, fuel day-to-day operations, and inform business decisions.
Around 79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months, with 43% revealing they encountered ten or more.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have moved to a remote-first or hybrid work environment. Remote-first and hybrid workforces rely almost solely on mobile devices to access company data and networks on a daily basis.
With more employees using company-issued mobile devices to access valuable company data, organizations must strengthen their strategies around ensuring data security for their corporate-issued devices.
Company-issued—or corporate-liable—mobile devices typically have access to valuable company data. If your company-issued devices have access to any of the following eight types of data, you’ll want to implement a company-wide mobile device policy.
- Customer data
- Employee data
- Financial data
- Intellectual property data
- Marketing data
- Operations data
- Product data
- Sales data
Customer Data
Customer data consists of behavioral and demographic information companies collect to communicate, engage, and understand their customers. Businesses can obtain customer data through surveys or by customers providing information as they interact with a company’s mobile application, social media, or website.
Customer data includes, but is not limited to:
- Contact information
- Payment methods
- Account planning or customer support
- Feedback or survey data
- Order history
- Current services
- Preferences
- Customer service tickets
Whether it’s collected through a request or provided voluntarily, customer data is essential to a successful business strategy, as it enables companies to reflect and improve the customer experience as needed.
Employee Data
Employee data consists of all the personnel information stored throughout an employee’s lifecycle—from initial job application to promotions and changes in departments to separation from the company.
Employee data includes, but is not limited to:
- VPN account information
- Salary information
- Performance management data
- Contact information
- Banking information for direct deposit
- Account passwords
- Age, gender, race
- Home or office location information
Employee data contains sensitive information and should be protected at all costs. A leak of employee data could result in legal action, as employee data can store social security and location information, which could compromise the security and safety of an employee.
Financial Data
Financial data details a company’s financial health, position, and performance. Internal management analyzes financial data to determine if they need to adjust their business strategy.
Financial data includes, but is not limited to:
- Purchases
- Returns
- Expenses
- Account information
- Forecasts
- Investor information
- Subscriptions
- Donations
- Lending
- Equity information
- Contracts and agreements
Financial data consists of information related to a transaction or financial account, including credit card numbers, credit information, credit rating data, customer account numbers, and transaction history.
Organizations must protect company financial data given hackers can access financial information from decommissioned devices, leaving companies and their customers at risk for a data breach or fraudulent activity on their corporate accounts.
Additionally, if accessed, hackers can hold sensitive financial data for ransom, forcing an organization to comply with them, resulting in severe financial loss.
Intellectual Property Data
Intellectual property (IP) data is a compilation of data surrounding information about creative works. IP data plays a significant role in creating, spreading, and using new knowledge for further innovation and inventions.
IP data includes, but is not limited to:
- Research and development
- Information crafted by employees and partners
- Future business ideas and trends
- Patent information
IP data is multifaceted. It recognizes data about the IP, like the type of property it is—product specifications, proprietary technology, concept, logo—or the industry it belongs to, and data related to the IP, like the type of media it is, its trademarks, or who owns it.
Marketing Data
Marketing data is a source of customer information obtained from interactions and engagement between an organization and its prospects, customers, and community.
Marketing teams use marketing data to determine how to improve branding and promotion, analyze return on investment (ROI), predict customer behaviors, drive marketing analytics, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Marketing data includes, but is not limited to:
- Market research data
- Successful marketing collateral
- Market share information
- Competitor information
- Key differentiators
- Winning RFP responses
- Website
- Accounts and passwords
- Password-protected webpages
- SEO / SERP marketing strategies
- Social media
- Accounts and passwords
- Campaign information (what’s working vs. what isn’t working)
- Target market information
- Reputation information
Marketing data is an essential tool for sales and product teams, too, and provides insights on how to be more impactful in their efforts.
Operations Data
Operations data pertains to an organization’s system and day-to-day operations. Operations data provides quick updates, allowing teams to stay up-to-date on timely information.
Operations data collects data on customers, which helps marketing teams refine advertising efforts and further define their target audience.
Additionally, operations data helps product teams get a clear understanding of what products and tools customers need as their organization grows, informing the product creation process.
Ensuring the security of operations data is crucial as inventory and supply chain data fall within this category. Unprotected operations data can cause extensive damage, as it contains sensitive data like addresses, credit cards, and purchase history.
Protecting operations data is essential given confidential data on customers, inventory, and purchases are, for the most part, the information cybercriminals strive to obtain to carry out cyber attacks.
Operations data includes, but is not limited to:
- Internal processes
- Supply chain information
- Warehouse and inventory data
- Interactions between team members, investors, channel partners, vendors, customers, and other stakeholders
- Emails
- Voicemails
- Chats
- Text messages
Product Data
Product data is all the technical information throughout the entire product creation stage—beginning, developing, and final stage, when the product has been sold into the market.
Organizations must protect product data because it contains sensitive information related to coding, projects, and development.
If product data is compromised or exposed, companies risk losing their strategies or progress on projects, allowing other organizations to gain a competitive advantage.
Product data includes, but is not limited to:
- Product data and descriptions
- Specifications of products
- Pricing information
Product data helps engineers and product managers determine if the proposed product is achievable with the overall design-build and meets building standards.
Sales Data
Sales data is essentially any information or metric that can be measured in the sales process, such as quotes for specific customers, and lists of leads or prospective deals.
Additionally, sales data can detail critical information like how sales teams will sell products or services, and whether the company will sell directly to customers or through resellers.
Analyzing sales data can improve forecasting and identify key insights, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Sales decisions consider customer preferences and market changes, and sales data informs those decisions.
Sales data includes, but is not limited to:
- Go-to-market strategy
- Quotes
- Leads and opportunity data
- Channel partner information
Sales data helps sales teams identify new opportunities, improve their performance, optimize the sales process, and understand their customers better.
Sales data should be protected at all costs, as it contains information regarding clients, prospects, and sales strategies.
Ensuring Data Security Through Mobile Device Recovery with Mobile ReCell
With the rise of data breaches and security incidents, it’s imperative to strengthen your organization’s data security initiatives.
Ensuring mobile device security by implementing policies, procedures, and proper data destruction mitigates threats to your company, employees, partners, and customers.
One of the most effective steps to mitigating a corporate data breach is to recover all corporate-owned IT assets.
Corporate data is invaluable. Each asset Mobile reCell processes endures NIST-compliant data erasure and receives a Certificate of Data Destruction with an audit trail for a secure chain of logistics, so you can rest assured knowing your data is secure.
Our team of experts will walk through your existing security initiatives and provide best practices based on years of experience. Implementing a company-wide mobile device policy sets the expectations for how your employees will safely access company data on mobile IT assets.
Mobile reCell has implemented DevSecOps practices and is currently under a SOC 2 Type 2 audit to assure our customers we have adequate security controls in place around infrastructure, people, and processes regarding the protection and privacy of sensitive corporate data.
For assistance with ensuring data security for your corporate-liable mobile IT assets, contact us.
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