Businesses Have Messy Emails: The Relationship between Security and Sales

This Slogging thread by Arthur Tkachenko occurred in slogging's official #programming channel and has been edited for readability.

Jumping to sales teams.

Security, sensitive information sharing, automation, tracking, and managing sales pipelines and business contacts.

How often do you reading your emails from your personal devices?
Do you forward some sensitive information between your work address and personal email address?

Let's talk about security.

Monitor for Phishing and Scam Attempts. Ensure that you are cautious in the emails that you open, especially from unfamiliar sources. In the event of a phishing attempt, make sure to report it directly to your IT department and ensure that they have the most time possible to prevent any potential data breaches.

It’s important to make sure that all your client information is kept in one place, especially when working remotely. This is not only to reduce general data loss and increase efficiency but also to reduce the risk of data theft. The more places or applications you use to store your data, statistically, the greater chance that one of them will suffer a data breach.

While working remotely, companies have less control over the networks that employees use. In a physical office environment, everyone uses the same network that the business has provided, meaning it’s safe and secure for all. While working from different locations, sales teams have more opportunities to connect to unsecured networks, which is one of the most common ways for data to be leaked or stolen.

Haha, looks like it's impossible for small companies!

In addition to having more security issues related to the different platforms, it also becomes easier for hackers to perform phishing attempts or gain access to private information and data due to potential confusion.

When you have a lot of employees all communicating across multiple platforms with different uses, confusion is bound to happen. According to https://enterprise.verizon.com/resources/reports/2019-data-breach-investigations-report.pdf, over 1/5th of cybersecurity breaches occur due to human error, which goes to show, that streamlining communication as much as possible can reduce crucial errors.

Guys from Nord are providing cool service.

Ensure authorized personnel is accessing your user accounts, and nobody else.

aka if your team is located in the US, nobody from Europe must be able to log in. or better have a whitelist of IPs.(yeah, no to working from a coffee, sorry not sorry)

So many things to talk about!
Like how to prevent human errors? I don't have a proper answer. While planning and automation can help. And expertise.

Having a team of salespeople? The higher the number, the more risks and higher the probability of problems

Cross-teams collaboration can also be an issue

Salespeople have access to lots of data...
in my previous article, I told a few stories, but I'm sure, there are more.

and it's hard to manage everything and prevent from leaking some personal information like bank details, personal email addresses, or just making a typo in email address and sending things to a wrong person

Cool article: https://www.tessian.com/research/the-psychology-of-human-error/

While big companies have probably a great software and processes inside - there are a lot of things to do for a small companies

https://www.tessian.com/research/the-state-of-data-loss-prevention-2020/
Yeah, it's hard to balance all risks at the same time, especially if your company is growing quickly and you have a lot of chats on Slack

Threats prevention, Education, Automation, Great infrastructure setup, and centralized data storage might help

Training, Training, Training!
Train your teammates.

Part one of this series: https://hackernoon.com/businesses-have-messy-emails.