Protect Your Sensitive Data With Client-Side Encryption
As any seasoned title insurance professional will tell you, real estate transactions are complex beasts, requiring different stakeholders to share personal information sometimes across great distances. This presents massive challenges, especially at a time when data breaches seem more common than ever. What can an independent agent do to protect personal and proprietary information? Technologies like client-side encryption (CSE) offer a possible way forward. CSE can reduce your attack surface and limit liability by centralizing key management and strengthening access controls. Let’s see how it can help secure your agency from the threats of both today and tomorrow.
What is client-side encryption?
You have likely heard about encryption and perhaps even use such technology at your agency. After all, encryption technologies have been in place across multiple industries for decades. CSE is a more recent innovation. It offers users greater control over when and where their data is encrypted, and over who can decrypt this information.
How does it differ from traditional encryption?
CSE technology differs from traditional methods of encryption in two key aspects: where the actual encryption occurs and who controls the encryption keys. When using CSE, data is usually encrypted on a user’s local device before being sent to a server or shared over a cloud network. Access to this data is similarly held by the user, which means that the data remains completely inaccessible to a service or network provider.
How CSE can benefit your agency
There are clear security implications for your agency when you choose to implement CSE. CSE can help strengthen defenses against data breaches and other criminal activity. When equipped with this technology, agencies are freed from relying on third-party providers to manage security keys. Even if your network or service provider goes down or is compromised in some way, your data will remain safe and secure. Additionally, CSE gives companies greater control over who can decrypt their data, allowing them to align access permissions with organizational policies or user roles.
For highly regulated businesses like title insurance, CSE may be particularly advantageous. Title agencies are required to meet various compliance obligations, which include taking steps to ensure consumer security and privacy. CSE can directly help with these requirements.
Be future-ready with CSE
CSE doesn’t just have immediate benefits; it can also help your agency prepare for future challenges. For example, data protection laws are expanding throughout the world and the United States, imposing ever-more-stringent regulations on how businesses operate online. Data sovereignty laws are similarly growing, mandating that organizational data stay within a specific geographical location. Lastly, the rise of AI and quantum computing is upending many current encryption methodologies.
CSE holds great promise for agencies looking to navigate these seismic changes. It can ensure data is immediately encrypted at the source where it is created, thus satisfying key data protection provisions. It can empower companies to maintain control over encryption keys and not rely on providers who may be hundreds of miles away. And it provides enhanced security that can help agencies use AI safely while preparing for the next wave of cryptography advances.
Consider CSE for your encryption needs For title businesses, protecting sensitive organizational and customer data is non-negotiable. Encryption has long been the go-to method for accomplishing this goal, but traditional technologies may be insufficient for the changing digital environment. Client-side encryption offers potential advantages by encrypting data right at the source and ensuring that access is strictly maintained. Companies that adopt it no longer need to rely on third parties, can more easily comply with regulations, and are better prepared to leverage emerging technologies. In a competitive business environment like ours, those are benefits worth considering.
Tags: business, cybersecurity, data breach, technology