Modern business has a complex relationship with customer data. On the one hand, this data is crucial for businesses as they seek to develop lasting relationships with customers and deliver products and services that energize the market. On the other, data needs to be stored, handled and managed with extreme care, ensuring that businesses remain fully compliant with all regulations.
This makes data protection an absolute priority. Read on to learn more about where secure forms fit within your data security strategy, and how you can achieve optimal full compliance on an ongoing basis.
Choose forms with secure protocols
Headlessforms is designed to handle customer data – data that is typically highly sensitive and protected by compliance standards and regulations. With this in mind, security is built into the very foundation of the solution. By deploying full encryption on all data transfers, the Headlessforms team is able to protect the data of your business and your users, essentially providing cloud-based security to protect your data that maintains high standards of compliance. This is backed up with end-to-end encryption across the whole data storage and management process. Meanwhile, a sophisticated security concept ensures data is accessible by personnel cleared to use it, and protected from entities without this clearance.
Maintain an auditable store of data
In order to comply with international and domestic data management regulations, you need to maintain data stores that can be easily audited and assessed. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that covers the European Union, for example, requires organizations to operate transparent and honest policies when it comes to user data. California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) requires the same levels of transparency, but it covers only for-profit businesses operating in the state of California. Under these regulations, users have the right to request and access any of their data held by your organization. As such, you will need to be able to audit your held data and respond immediately and completely to any access requests from users.
Headlessforms ensures data is fully auditable and accessible on request while also supporting security audits to make sure all requirements are fully adhered to. When deploying Headlessforms, you will gain access to a Data Processing Agreement that forms part of your terms and conditions. These agreements are required under international regulation codes, including GDPR.
Implement MFA and personnel management
Your personnel will need to be able to access user data, and then deploy this data within marketing and lead nurturing processes. However, this access must be secure. Multi-factor authentication – or MFA – will make sure that only authorized users can access the areas of your platform that handle and store form responses while also achieving compliance with GDPR, CCPA and other regulatory codes. Meanwhile, management teams should be able to off board users when required – for example, if a user leaves the company and is no longer authorized for sensitive data access.
Streamline data collection
The simpler option is generally the better option. If there are too many variables and too many moving parts, errors can quickly emerge, which can lead to compliance issues. At Headlessforms, we have designed our solution to be as simple and as straightforward as possible, assisting our users as they streamline their processes and target full compliance. Developers use the Headlessforms code attribute to implement the form and then direct responses straight to the centralized storage and monitoring area, eliminating much of the complexity and making data security easier to achieve.
Select forms with secure integrations
Using a secure forms solution will protect data that is sent from your users to your business. However, you also need to consider how you will utilize this data after you receive it. In order to leverage optimal insight, you’ll need to share sensitive information with your other business applications, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
If you need to open individual apps and manually transfer data between each solution, the overall security of your operation will be compromised. For instance, many businesses have historically resorted to exporting data to an Excel file and then sharing this file via an email solution. This exposes sensitive data to a range of weak points on its journey, as well as significant risk. Headlessforms is designed to avoid this potential frailty, integrating directly and securely with other applications in your toolkit. Information is transferred between solutions quickly and effectively, with no security weak points and no possibility of human error during data input.
Headlessforms also implements encryption for data at rest, protecting information of all types even when it is not in use or being transferred. This is another aspect of Headlessforms that assists businesses as they tick off regulatory compliance requirements.
Provide Training, Education and Support for all personnel
Solutions such as Headlessforms are designed to be easy to use, giving your business the means to develop and deploy secure forms with minimal coding and development expertise. However, you will still need to make sure that your personnel have the proper training and education required to implement these solutions in the proper way. This extends to all aspects of your business’s security strategy – a systematic approach to training and support will be necessary if you are to secure your operations.
Put Headlessforms at the Heart of Your Data Protection Strategy
At Headlessforms, we understand how crucial data protection and regulatory compliance are to your business. With this in mind, we don’t compromise on security, providing reliable, easy-to-implement forms to our business users. To discover more about how this works for your business, reach out to our team.
