3 Ways Contract Management Increases Security of Your Contracts
As your enterprise leverages the Internet, laptops, and mobile devices to operate faster and meet the pressing of your clientele, your enterprise is also exposing itself to a wider range of potential attacks from malicious hackers and corporate spies.
While you may think that the data of your enterprise isn’t valuable to cyber thieves, one must only take a look at the wide range of victims from attacks in recent years. From the health care industry (UCLA Health System and Excellus Blue Cross BlueShield) to the federal government sector to the retail sector (eBay, Target, and Home Depot), so many organizations are getting hacked that a poll of key IT security professionals across 19 industries revealed that 52% of respondents believed that they’ll likely be hit by a successful cyber attack this year.
This is why increasing the security of your processes should be among your contract management resolutions for 2017. To put your enterprise on track towards this objective, let’s review three ways contract management increases the security of your contracts.
- Virtualization of CLM Software
Using their mobile devices and laptops, your contract managers are on the go. At the same time, your clients are using a wide range of devices to receive and provide contract data. This means that your enterprise needs to provide highly secure connections between both parties to ensure the integrity of all shared contract data across a wide range of connections.
Using a cloud-based CLM solution, your enterprise reduces the cost per user of maintaining the security of your IT infrastructure and share the risk with a certified IT vendor. By using your in-house IT department, your enterprise is responsible for all costs for applications, maintenance, IT infrastructure, and IT resources. On the other hand, by paying a subscription you’ll have access to a sophisticated web-based application at a fraction of the cost.
Why is virtual CLM software more secure? First, of all because it reduces the number of entry points to your system. Second, it offers a very high uptime guarantee. For example, Contract Logix offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for all of its SaaS or Cloud solutions. Third, provides around the clock support that isn’t dependent on in-house staff. Still, a robust CLM solution is flexible enough to meet the demands of an enterprise to use its own IT infrastructure for compliance, accounting preferences, or more control.
- Secure Capture of All Client Data
While you have greater control over the type of devices that your employees use, you hardly have any over the ones that your clients use. In the end, most communications with clients happen over via email, but gathering information this way increases the likelihood of data theft.
According to the Verizon 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, in the financial sector, 30% of phishing messages were opened in 2015 and 12% of targets clicked on the malicious attachment or link. This is why sending back and forth contract forms and documents needs to be through a more secure channel than email (remember the Sony Hack in December 2014?).
Email isn’t a replacement for contract management software. This is where the ability of CLM software to create secure forms comes in. Through your CLM solution, you can build and customize secure forms to take in any type of data from your clients, including upload of documents. The forms are device- and operating system-agnostic so they adapt to the screen size of any device that can connect to the Internet. More importantly, these forms encrypt all client data and securely send it to the appropriate contract manager. Encryption provides a protective layer between your contract data and hackers, effectively minimizing the chances of data theft.
- Higher Level of Security
Depending on your industry, your enterprise may need to meet more than one certification. Why would you add to that list another one to meet the operational security requirements of an IT company? A better approach is to hire the services of a CLM software vendor that meets credentials, such as SSAE16 that certify the operational security of their computing services.
Contract Logix is a SSAE-16 Type II certified company that provides managed SaaS and hosting options for its contract management solutions. Your contract data is hosted securely in highly redundant data center locations all within the U.S. providing you the highest levels of physical security and availability in the industry. Contract Logix encrypts all of its data backups and securely transfers to data retention facilities, which are SOC II / SSAE 16 certified. All audits and reports are performed by third parties, and made available to customers bi-annually, for the latest usage reports.
Takeaway
Across all industries, enterprise no longer can afford to ignore the dire need to increase the security of your contracts and sharing sensitive contract data. A large enough malicious attack on your enterprise could be a major blow not only to your enterprise’s reputation but also to your enterprise’s sustainability to continue operations. By using the services of a certified vendor of CLM software, you gain access to unparalleled IT expertise at a much lower cost than if you were to do so on your own, if even possible at all.
