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Encryption, firewalls, passwords and clouds: If these terms make your eyes glaze over, we understand. But they’re critical when it comes to payroll security, especially when you’ve outsourced your payroll to a third-party provider.
To sleep soundly at night, you want certainty your payroll partner is safeguarding your data. I'll share what I've learned during my more than 25 years in IT focusing on three key areas you should ask about and understand when thinking about your payroll data security.
As cybercrime continues to rise, it's important to consider these sobering statistics. In 2020, cyberattacks against the United States surged, more than doubling in number and making up about 47% of all cyberattacks worldwide. But what does that mean for small and medium-sized businesses? According to Accenture’s Cybercrime study, they are a big target. In fact, nearly 43% of cyber-attacks were targeted at businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees.
What do hackers want? It's generally financially motivated. According to the Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware continues its reign as one of the top Action types present in breaches, and while it did not actually grow, it did hold statistically steady at 24%. Ransomware is ubiquitous among organizations of all sizes and in all industries.
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What can business owners look for to ensure their companies don't fall victim to ransomware? Here are three payroll security measures to look for:
Your outsourced payroll provider should have multiple security measures in place to prevent unauthorized viewing of information going back and forth between you and them, including:
Your payroll partner should authenticate information from a personnel file before engaging in conversation with someone who claims to be one of your employees. A common method of stealing an identity is to trick service providers into revealing information about an individual by pretending to be that person. Your provider’s employees should be trained to avoid such scams and be regularly tested in verification methods to ensure payroll security.
Axcet HR Solutions also encourages clients and business partners to use passwords when sending documents to reduce the risk of compromising sensitive data. We also remind our clients to train their employees to recognize “phishing” emails and to avoid clicking on suspicious emails or file attachments. Hackers commonly use phishing emails to steal data and deploy damaging ransomware and malware.
Your payroll provider should require its employees to complete intensive, ongoing security training, emphasizing the importance of secure passwords and emails, computer protection and how to avoid phishing and identity theft scams.
At Axcet, employees must pass a test on each of these topics. Afterward, they are randomly tested in real-life situations through simulated hacking, phishing email scams and “vishing” phone calls. Any failures throughout their Axcet careers are remediated with additional training and practice scenarios.
Axcet also strictly adheres to a “clean desk” policy, explicitly described in our handbook, that prohibits employees from leaving out any exposed client information after work hours.
For your added peace of mind, your payroll partner should maintain its own cloud environment and multi-layered security. The company should retain full control, all the way from the cloud application itself to physical access to the servers, so that no one can access the data or the facilities without the provider’s direct knowledge.
Because Axcet HR Solutions maintains its own cloud, we do not have to compromise our high standards or meet the lowest common requirement due to other “tenants” who share physical hardware in a public cloud environment.
Our client data are surrounded by security layers that include firewalls, network security, access control and a locked room where our servers are located. Clients’ raw data are structured to prevent other programs from reading it, and Axcet uses encryption to further obscure the data location.
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Axcet HR Solutions stakes our reputation on payroll data security. We budget any resources necessary for the most advanced payroll security measures. We regularly train our employees to protect data. We continuously back up data with redundant systems. And we maintain as much control as possible over storage procedures.
We care for your data like it's our own, so you can rest easy partnering with Axcet HR Solutions for your Kansas City payroll services or any other HR function. Here are six reasons Kansas City small and medium-sized businesses have been trusting Axcet HR Solutions with their business' payroll needs for more than 30 years.
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