In an increasingly mobile and connected world, your agency needs to respond by transforming to a digital insurance agency. Your employees, customers, and prospects are accessing more information digitally than ever before. Is your agency equipped to mitigate the risks associated with the digitization of insurance? These steps can help you prepare your team and your business.
1. Assess your risk
Start by understanding where your agency is vulnerable. Our partners at ACT have great resources to get you started on their Compliance and Protection Roadmap.
2. Be intentional about access
Limit who can see sensitive information. There is no need for everyone in your office to see each client and prospect’s birthday and social security number. And access doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Create security levels, granting different views to different staff as needed.
Discover more cybersecurity resources on our blog
3. Encrypt Data
Ensure all data is encrypted at all times. That means using encryption when information is shared, too.
4. Establish processes
Detail when it’s okay to access, update, or share data and how to do so safely. The more details you can provide, the more secure your processes can be.
5. Train your team
Cybersecurity should be part of your regular training, including for on-boarding new team members and annual refreshers. There are several services explicitly designed to help businesses equip their employees to stop cyber-attacks. Companies like KnowBe4 provide full-length courses and tools to educate and prepare your team.
Get more details on how to prep your team to work remotely and securely
6. Monitor and test your systems
Have a team devoted to watching for attacks and regularly testing that systems work, including how employees handle phishing and other cyber-attack attempts. This team should also know how to address issues as they happen and be well-versed in data recovery protocol. If you don’t have the resources in-house, you can outsource to products like KnowBe4’s PhishER or talk with your agency management system provider to identify how they manage and protect your agency data.
7. Get the right security partners
Our Partner Platform team is up-to-date on digital insurance cybersecurity issues thanks to our partners like ACORD, and Big I’s ACT. Our commitment to security is one of Partner Platform’s defining features and a critical aspect of how we serve the needs of our partner agencies. And, we’re committed to stay up-to-date with national and state cyber security regulations, such as New York’s NY DSF regulations, so we can guarantee full security compliance for our Partner agencies across the country.
Want to get connected with a provider that puts security first? Get in touch with a Partner Platform team member today.
Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Strategic Insurance Software (SIS) is the team behind Partner Platform — the agency management system that sets independent agents free from the status quo of over-paying and under-utilizing their agency software. “Partner” is more than a name – it’s who we are. For more information, please visit https://sispartnerplatform.com.