How To Protect Your Proprietary Information While Communicating Overseas?

In today’s business climate, the entrepreneurs are communicating with clients all over the world. They are dealing with suppliers in China and distributors in Mexico. Their customers are in the United States and South Africa. Protecting sensitive information has become a challenge for today’s entrepreneur. They want to keep their secrets safe while still be able to talk with colleagues in another part of the world. International business communication is becoming a tricky endeavour.

What Can Entrepreneurs Do?

  • When dealing with clients or suppliers who are overseas, companies should first ensure that all modes of communication are secure. You need to buy encryption software to protect your communications. That way, you won’t have to worry about the wrong people listening into your conversations, which happens sometimes.
  • You want to trust only a limited number of people. Communicate with the manager of the supplying company. Do not discuss proprietary information with people who have no authority in the other company. This step will reduce the number of people who have access to passwords and encryption codes.
  • Use secure Web servers. Https stands for the secure protocol. When you are trying to protect customers sensitive information or your proprietary information, you should use the secure server. In addition, have a few additional levels of security to prevent a hacker from tapping into your business communication and stealing information.

Why Is Protecting Information Important?

The advantage to the global economy is that you are able to deal with clients, customers and suppliers around the world. However, the disadvantage to the global economy is that everything is transparent. You have more difficult time preventing competitors from knowing what you are doing. Systems are easily hacked and security breaches are happening regularly.

Entrepreneurs have to protect their livelihoods by protecting what information is released and what is withheld. Although companies long ago had these goals, they were able to withhold much more than today. So many companies are working on cloud-based software, which is becoming a challenge for those entrepreneurs that want to release only certain information.

Besides protecting their livelihood, entrepreneurs want to protect their communications to improve sales. If you give out all the information, customers might decide they don’t need your product. If you leave them wanting more, they will have to buy the product to determine whether it works as it is claimed. In addition, you have to protect your customers. Without protecting communications, your customers could be victims of identity theft.

When Should You Protect Information?

Entrepreneurs should be careful of what gets released when the product is in the research and development phase before it is proven. If you release information too early, you could have to do damage control when something goes wrong. If you release information too late, you might lose that buzz that the industry is experiencing relating to your product.

You also want to protect your information from suppliers that don’t need to know everything. They could supply raw materials to your competitors too. The last thing you want to happen is your competitors getting a jump on your product while you are still developing it.

When your employees go home, you have to ensure that all data stays locked away. Even if your employees telecommute, use the encryption software to ensure only your employees can log into your server and database.

How to Find the Right Communication Software

To protect your business communications, you have to choose wisely. Entrepreneurs have options for software designed to secure business communications. You should choose a system that blocks all unnecessary communications. You should find a system that is flexible to meet your needs for all your departments. You want a system that is easy to use and requires very little training. Better yet, find a company that offers training along with the system.

Choose systems that offer chat histories and offline messaging. You want something that will record activity logs for all your employees. You need to manage your contacts, especially those who might be supplying your raw materials or your customers. Some systems have import/export features for network users. They also have secured group chat options for conversations over many miles. This would ensure that all employees are on the same page.

Work with a company you can trust. Look for the reviews of the communications software online. Talk with people in your industry. Find out what they use for their secured business communications. Listen to bloggers for their recommendations.

Although the economy is open and global, you don’t always want your international business communications to be well-known. Therefore, you have to take action to protect your proprietary information while communicating overseas to suppliers and customers.

charlescrawford275
 

Charles Crawford is a high-level entrepreneur and co-founder of Crawford and O’Brien. Charles has been studying internet marketing, web design, and tech start-ups for years, and he has been successful with multiple business ventures such as affiliate marketing (where 98%+ of people never make money).