Data security has emerged as a key consideration

“Your database in many cases is your lifeblood.”

“One of the things that we’ve been focusing on and that we believe has changed [within the lettershop industry] is the focus on security,” says John Leonard, vice president of sales and marketing at Cover-All. “For us, that’s a really big deal and that’s a change that we’ve tried to implement over the last five or six years.”

“This change is driven by the growing understanding of the value of data on the part of marketers, customers and criminals alike. The increase in data that we as marketers are collecting on [customers], I think that’s making people more paranoid and we need to be more sensitive in protecting this data. I think that’s pushing the requirement to be more focused on data security,” Leonard observes. “As we know, in the age of increasingly sophisticated data-driven marketing, it is not unusual for companies to be incorporating not only identifying information such as names and addresses but also significant financial information and other data that is extremely valuable to nefarious types in the segmentation and even the creative of direct mail campaigns.”

“We hold an ISO 27001 certification,” says Leonard. “It’s a third-party certification where there’s a set of about 500 or 600 protocols that we have to adhere to and then we have a third-party auditor come in once a year and spend a few days with us going through everything, right down to how often we change our passwords. We have double authentication to get on to our laptops; our laptops are encrypted at rest so our data is encrypted at rest.”

“All these protocols are something that—10 or 15 years ago—you would never have heard of [lettershops doing this]. We believe we’re probably the only lettershop, not in the statementing space but in the promotional space, that has that ISO 27001 certification. For us that’s a pretty big deal.”

Regarding certification, “we think it’s important that our customers know how seriously we take this. Your database in many cases is your lifeblood and we take it really seriously.”

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