For CE Software, Take Privacy and Data Security Seriously

When it comes to choosing continuing education (CE) software, learner privacy and data security matter. For one thing, you want your learners to be confident you’re using their data appropriately. What’s more, you want to know with absolute certainty that you’ll never lose any of your CE data.

So, how should a CE software provider help you address these issues? By insisting on strict rules and procedures – and following them.

Getting it right requires know-how and diligence.

If you’re like us, you believe that learners have a right not to have their data viewed or used by anyone other than the organization to whom they’ve provided it. In other words, only you should have access to their data.

What’s more, you need to know that your CE data will remain secure and retrievable under all possible circumstances. Hardware malfunction? Data center shutdown? There should still be a way to access your data.

Unless you’ve got significant resources and expertise, checking all of those boxes is difficult. It might even be impossible.

By the time we start talking privacy and security with a CE provider, they’ve typically realized two different things:

1. Going it alone is too risky. In the absence of continually updated privacy standards and compliance monitoring, it’s very difficult to provide the privacy your CE learners deserve. And unless you can understand, manage, and afford to secure your data against all conceivable instances of theft and loss, handling data security yourself could cause more problems than it solves.
2. Software providers need to establish and follow strict privacy and security standards. If you’re selecting a CE software vendor, you’ll need to know they go the extra mile to protect your learners’ privacy and secure your data. Nobody can afford to lose any data, your vendor included. They need to understand that as well as you do.

Ultimately, a CE software provider must go to extraordinary lengths to provide the highest levels of privacy and data security. The first step toward getting there? Standards.

Privacy standards help you protect your learners.

The Global Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is big news right now. As of May 25, 2018, virtually all organizations that do business in the EU and collect electronic data must comply with the GDPR. Many organizations that don’t do business in the EU have also decided to comply simply because it’s smart business.

At Rievent, we’ve already implemented the GDPR. It’s just the latest of several privacy standards we’ve adopted over the years.

Why should CE software providers use privacy standards? Because they give us stringent benchmarks to meet, privacy-wise. The more rigorous the standard, the more privacy your learners enjoy.

In addition to GDPR, we follow various internal standards. Taken together, these standards specify the types of data our employees can and cannot access – and under what circumstances. All of the standards we follow live inside a “compliance matrix” that we audit on a regular basis to ensure we’re living up to the stringent guidelines we believe in and that our clients require.

And as the addition of GDPR to our collection of privacy standards suggests, our compliance matrix is not a static repository. Rather, it’s constantly updated with new standards and changes to existing ones. It’s a living document.

When it comes to security, your risk of data loss needs to be nil.

Keeping up with ever-changing enterprise data storage and data security technology is best left to specialists. In other words, most vendors of most types of CE software should rely on servers owned and managed by a separate organization. Otherwise, they’ll quickly be left behind, tech-wise.

At Rievent, we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for all of our client data. AWS gives us access to high-availability databases with built-in failover capabilities within modern and secure virtual private networks. We also back up our data to multiple physical locations within AWS secure networks.

All of these factors increase the performance of your CE software and minimize the risk of data loss. AWS is also the same infrastructure that several Fortune 500 companies use. It’s as secure as it gets, and it’s getting better all the time.

Along with our strong SLA, these arrangements give CE providers incredible peace of mind when it comes to data security. They’ve mitigated every imaginable risk!

Just as we insist on the toughest standards for learner data privacy, we also insist on the most robust infrastructure for data integrity, security, and disaster recovery. After all, you can’t afford to lose your data. Neither can we.

And we won’t.