In This Article: Everything You Need to Protect Your Data
As our world continues its rapid digitization, there is no question that online tools and services have revolutionized the way that we conduct business. However, with all of the benefits that come with technology, there is always the risk of a data breach, and data security becomes more important by the day. Everyone has heard horror stories of cyber attacks, but often don’t think that they themselves are at risk. The truth is that data breaches affect millions of people around the world and are on the rise.
Digital security in the travel and tourism industry should be a top priority for businesses. Remember, it’s not only your information at risk, it’s your customers’ information as well. With the right technology and solid security habits, you’ll reduce that risk. Luckily, Rezgo is here to help.
Common reasons for data breaches in the tour industry
A data breach can be devastating for both businesses and individuals. If a business is attacked, they suffer massive blows to their reputation and financial bottom line. When an individual is the victim of a data breach, they suffer the risk of identity theft, bank fraud and a number of other crimes.
In order to protect your business and customers from a data breach, it is important to understand how your online habits or security measures may be putting you and your customers at risk. Here are some ways that your company may be at risk:
- Weak password protection: Stolen or weak credentials are among the most common causes of data breaches. Many people use the same password across multiple accounts, so if their login information is compromised by a hacker, they can gain access to valuable information in a number of different places.
- Third party access: If your booking software access is not secure, third-party vendors, former staff or outside agents could be used as a gateway for hackers to access your system.
- Lax data handling: If the worst should happen and a malicious outsider accesses your system, they can only access the data that’s available to them. If you’re storing unnecessary sensitive or personally identifying data or giving access to that data to employees who don’t need it, you’re increasing your risk.
5 Rezgo tools that can help you secure your data
Rezgo’s internal practices prioritize data security, and there are a number of features available to you through Rezgo that can help to ensure that your data is secure.
Make as many User Accounts as you need
Account sharing poses a serious threat to your business’s data security. With Rezgo, you can create as many user accounts as you need at no extra cost. This gives each user unique login information so that no account sharing is required. Setting up multiple accounts ensures that if one user’s information is breached, then the access is limited to that account, leaving the others uncompromised. You can increase account security even further by educating each user on the best practices for creating a secure password.
This feature also gives you the ability to track the activity of each individual user. If you need to determine who’s performed a specific task, you can go to a user’s profile or the activity log to find a full list of actions. This is especially valuable if something goes wrong and someone needs to be held accountable so it doesn’t happen again.
When an employee no longer works for your company, it’s important that you revoke their access as soon as possible. With Rezgo, you can remove them from the system’s users list and any booking or inventory items they owned will seamlessly move to the account administrator, or you can make accounts inactive–whatever works best for your reporting data.
Connect partners through the Reseller System
If you work with outside agents, you can give them their own user accounts too–but if you want to keep your data and their customer data fully secure, you can go a step further and use Rezgo’s reseller system. It lets you provide your inventory to be resold, with pricing and availability updated in real time. Resellers only get the information they need to sell bookings, and you only get the data you need to manage your billing and run your tours.
The best part is that any reseller with a Rezgo account can be an inventory provider, so you don’t have to do any additional account setup or provide any access to your account. With this system, you can also easily disconnect your reseller so that they can’t keep selling your inventory beyond when you allow it.
Limit access with Security Groups
A huge benefit to having multiple user accounts is that you can sort them into different security groups, depending on the level of access you’d like for each user. Rezgo provides default security groups so you can easily sort your users, or you can customize your security groups to suit your needs. For example, an administrator may be given access to everything except for settings, while a booking agent can only access and manage their own bookings. By sorting your users into different security groups, you are limiting access to the amount of data that is available to users–which also means limiting the amount of data exposed in any one security breach. This is a great way to increase your company’s data security.
Mandate password practices with Security Policies
Establishing a security policy for your company is a vital step in protecting your tour and activity business’s data. With a security policy, you can enforce standards for password complexity and account security. Rezgo has simplified this process, offering a range of security settings for all users that access your company’s Rezgo back end, including administrators.
When setting up your security policy, you are given a number of options to set security standards for your users:
- Password security: A simple yet crucial part of improving your data security is password protection. Rezgo offers a variety of password options so you can balance your security practices with ease of access, but as a rule of thumb, more complexity is usually better. Decide on a minimum number of characters that each user’s password must include. Set complexity requirements that each password must include, like numbers, capitals and special characters. And once you’re happy with your password policies, you can choose to expire passwords so that users are forced to update to your new requirements.
- Login Lifetime: If a user is on an account without any activity for a certain amount of time, you can have them automatically logged out. Ranging from 5 minutes to 5 hours, this will help prevent access to any unattended accounts.
- Two-factor Authentication: Adding two-factor authentication to your Rezgo security policy provides an extra layer of security. It means anyone accessing the account will need a password and also access to the authenticator. The default authentication will require an authentication app, such as Google Authenticator. You can also choose to allow authentication through email or text, but this is generally considered less secure. Finally, you can decide how frequently users should need to reauthenticate.
Protect credit card data with Payment Requests
Credit card fraud is rampant in the digital age, but Rezgo takes the necessary precautions to make sure that your customers are protected. You can do the same by using Rezgo’s payment requests. Many people offer their credit card information to companies over the phone or by email without knowing that they are putting themselves at risk. With payment requests, you can send an invoice with a secure payment form directly to your customers. The credit card information is processed through your payment gateway like any other secure online payment, and no credit card information is stored in Rezgo at any point. That makes it impossible to leak the information through your booking system.
Protecting credit card data also requires a little extra care from you and your staff. Make sure that credit card information is never entered into the system in places that it doesn’t belong, like in booking comments. Not only is that practice very insecure, it’s also likely to violate your merchant agreement. Payment requests help take care of that problem because they ensure that your customers are the only ones handling their credit card data.
Don’t wait until a data breach to start protecting your data security. Act now and you’ll be happy you did. As a business owner, you have a responsibility to protect your customer’s personal information, and Rezgo makes that easy.
Written By | Caitlyn McGee
