As someone who spends a great deal of time on the road, I always get nervous when I hear about a stolen laptop or a missing hard drive containing thousands of customer records. Where I grew up, anything stolen from a car just ended up at a pawn shop. You could safely assume that any data on a hard drive would either get wiped out, or just ignored by some future user.
Not anymore. Clever thieves now realize that they can extract more value from a hard drive's CRM data than from the equipment itself. Up until a few years ago, that could easily have been my laptop, with my customer data on it. I would hate to have to call up my clients and give them that kind of bad news.
That's one of the reasons I switched to hosted CRM for my own business, and why I often recommend it to my consulting clients. If someone breaks into my car while I'm running a roadside errand, the worst thing I have to deal with is borrowing or buying another laptop for the rest of the trip. All of my hard drive data is backed up at the office, and all of my customer data lives on the cloud. In the ultimate worst case scenario, I can stop by a Kinko's and rent a machine to get my work done.
If you're working at a company that doesn't use hosted CRM (and there are plenty of performance-related reasons why you might want to do that), you can still protect your customer data using encryption, hardware locks, or even by connecting remotely to your desktop computer using VNC, GoToMyPC, or LogMeIn. Still, with VPN, Wi-Fi, and 3G laptop connections, it's easier than ever to let your data live on a hosted CRM solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment