If your company and customer data are spread across multiple platforms and multiple user accounts, you may be at greater risk of data loss or theft and tracking all your data for GDPR purposes becomes more difficult. How are you managing yours?

Data is unwieldy. Organising it and keeping it safe takes a lot of work, and it’s not easy to keep it under control. Data is also essential to any successful business. Whether you’re collecting it, analysing it or just trying to make sense of it, it can help you take your business further. You need to store and organise data so that you can track customer relationships, measure key metrics and gain insights into your business. However, you also have a need and a duty to keep it safe, particularly when it’s sensitive information about your customers. Collecting and storing data can pose a number of problems, and you need to know how to tackle them.

CONTROL OF DATA

With the introduction of GDPR, the EU legislation concerning consumer data, managing your data has become something of a minefield. The harsh penalties mean that if you slip up, it could cost you a lot of money, and even your entire business. For small businesses, in particular, meeting the requirements that GDPR sets out has seemed pretty daunting, and a lot to ask. The key word is “consent” when it comes to GDPR. You need to be sure to get permission to do everything from placing cookies on people’s devices to keeping their email for your mailing list. It’s all about ensuring your customers have control of their data.  Your business needs to make sure you have control over it too and many are still reliant on multiple, unsecured spreadsheets which don’t meet the requirements for GDPR or keep your customers’ data safe.

ORGANISING DATA ACROSS DIFFERENT APPS

Even small and medium businesses can end up using a variety of apps and business software that they use to carry out their work. Across these apps, you can have a lot of data from a number of different sources. From invoices and accounting to customer relationship management software, coordinating all your data and getting your apps to “talk” to each other can cause a tangled mess. It might lead to mistakes, duplicate or lost data, missing information and just general confusion. When managing your business data for GDPR, connecting the dots between data from different parts of the organisation is a key concern for many businesses. Integrating your applications so that they can work together in harmony minimises data hack and data loss risk.

KEEPING DATA SECURE

Security is always a significant concern for data too. 52% of small businesses experienced a cybersecurity breach in 2017 and hackers are targeting smaller businesses because they are softer targets. When you have a suite of applications and many different employees who need access to them, just managing multiple user passwords and accounts can get complicated and a security risk. There is no choice about complying with GDPR and for that, data security is vital and protects your business – not to mention your customers. Doing this across a variety of different apps and systems is a careful balancing act that’s easy to upset, particularly if you resort to spreadsheets to move data around.

THE SOLUTION

Trying to manage too many apps is a recipe for disaster and is often a waste of valuable time. There’s so much potential for mistakes. If you want to avoid data disasters, managing all of your data from one place makes everything a lot simpler. Workhorse helps you to organise your data using one system so that your business can forget all your data worries. Consolidate all of your apps into one business process so you have all the tools and business data you need at your fingertips. Security is improved as you no longer have to keep track of multiple user accounts and passwords and risk are lowered with your data being spread across fewer platforms.  In short, you have better control over everyone’s accounts and your business data.

Handling data for your business doesn’t need to be difficult. With the right tools, you can take control of your data and stay in control.