Understand CRM integrations
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In today’s hyper-connected business landscape, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become indispensable tools for organizations of all sizes. It’s also become essential to integrate your CRM with your other software tools to improve efficiency, streamline data management, and enable new uses for your CRM data.
1. Integrations Can Be a Security Weak Point: Every new integration—whether with email platforms, social media, or sales tools—can expose your CRM to data breaches or compliance risks if not managed securely.
2. Best Practices Are Non-Negotiable: Secure CRM integrations require a layered defense: vetting vendors, using strong authentication, encrypting data, limiting API access, performing regular audits, and training staff.
3. Choose a CRM That Prioritizes Security: Partnering with a CRM like Nutshell, which has built-in security features like data encryption, compliance-ready protocols, and secure access control, makes protecting customer data easier and more reliable.
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Security should always be a top priority when your customer or business data is involved, so you’re likely wondering how CRM integrations can impact security and how to ensure secure CRM integrations that prioritize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data.
In this blog post, we delve into security and CRM integrations, exploring the potential risks, highlighting best practices, and equipping you with actionable insights to safeguard your business. Let’s get started.
CRM integrations are a vital link between your CRM and other crucial tools and platforms, enabling you to easily manage data across platforms and access additional functionality within your tools.
Businesses today can integrate their CRMs with a vast range of tools, including tools for email, customer support, document management, automation, and more.
For instance, integrating your CRM with customer support software streamlines support by syncing contact and interaction data across both platforms, providing agents with accurate and complete information. Integrating your CRM and your contract management software enables you to manage your sales documents right in your CRM and send data from proposals into your CRM.
These integrations enable businesses to get more value from their tech stacks and streamline workflows, enhance customer engagement, and drive data-informed decision-making.
To successfully integrate other software tools with your CRM and reap the benefits of CRM integration, CRM security needs to be a top consideration, as it always should be when it comes to your data.
CRM integrations and application programming interfaces (APIs)—interfaces that enable software to communicate with one another—are subject to many of the same security threats as other elements of your tech stack.
By understanding and proactively addressing potential risks, you can protect your data. Here are some of the most important security considerations related to CRM integrations.
One of the primary security threats businesses need to protect themselves from is unauthorized access and data breaches. Integrating your CRM with multiple systems creates new potential entry points where unauthorized individuals could gain access to sensitive data. Strong access controls, encryption, and regular security audits are essential to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and prevent data breaches.
Integrating new tools with your CRM provides new sources of data. When data is added to your system, it’s essential to ensure data quality and accuracy by applying data governance procedures and regularly cleaning and validating your data.
Any time you’re handling customer data, compliance with data protection regulations is essential. When working with CRM integrations, it’s important to ensure compliance with regulations through things like encryption, consent management, and data retention policies.
Security should be an integral part of your process from the very beginning to get the full benefit of CRM integrations and keep your data safe.
Below, we’ll go over some best practices to follow to help ensure secure CRM integrations.
Working with third-party integration providers is one of the easiest ways to integrate other software tools with your CRM. When selecting third-party providers, though, it’s essential to thoroughly vet them to ensure they have proper security measures in place.
Start by assessing their reputation and track record in handling data security. Look for certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, which indicate a commitment to information security best practices. Additionally, review the security policies, data encryption methods, access controls, and other measures they have in place to ensure they align with industry standards.
If you’re working with a third party for CRM integrations, they may handle many of the security best practices listed below. Even if you are working with a third party, it’s also important to be aware of some of the more technical CRM security best practices.
Controlling access to your CRM and other tools is essential for secure CRM integrations.
Having a secure token-based authentication method in place ensures that only authorized users can access your tools, APIs, and data. Any API keys should be treated with the same sensitivity as passwords.
Controlling access and user permissions is also vital for the security and integrity of your CRM integrations. Creating CRM access controls based on roles and responsibilities and only granting users the permissions necessary for their roles reduces risk.
Encrypting data during both storage and transmission is essential for keeping it secure and complying with security standards and regulations. Encryption makes your data unreadable to unauthorized individuals if they manage to gain access, providing an additional layer of defense. Ensure you also require signatures so only authorized users can decrypt or modify data.
Keeping up with the latest updates and security patches for your software and APIs helps protect you from known vulnerabilities and keeps your system secure. Apply any updates your vendors release to keep your tools and integrations up to date.
To keep your system secure, it’s essential to perform regular security audits and risk assessments. These assessments help you identify potential security vulnerabilities so you can fix them before any issues occur. You can work with security professionals or use automated tools to conduct these assessments.
Placing limits on how often your APIs can be called is important for protecting yourself from spikes in traffic that can hurt performance and denial of service (DoS) attacks, which aim to overwhelm a system with traffic to shut it down.
It’s also important to track the use of your APIs over time so that you can detect unusual spikes in usage that may indicate a threat.
To maximize security, your whole team needs to be on board. Regular employee training on security best practices is essential to keeping your CRM integrations secure.
Make sure all employees use strong passwords, know proper data management techniques, and understand their role in keeping your data secure.
If something does happen to your data, having a recent backup can be a lifesaver. It’s important to back up your data regularly so that if a security incident does occur, you can minimize the damage and recover more quickly.
If your CRM automatically backs up your data, this protection is built in for you. If not, you can manually back your data up by exporting and saving it in a secure location.
One of the best ways to ensure secure CRM integrations is to choose a CRM with strong security in place.
To ensure CRM security, look for a CRM that uses encryption, provides regular data backups, and only partners with trusted vendors. Your CRM should be able to provide you with information about their security practices.
Integrating your CRM with other tools is essential for getting the most value from your tech stack. To successfully implement these integrations, security needs to be top of mind. By following these best practices, you can enhance the security of your CRM integrations and protect your data.
You can learn more about the integrations that Nutshell offers and the security measures we have in place below.
Every new integration acts as a “spoke” in your tech stack. While they add functionality, they also create new potential entry points for unauthorized access. If an integration with an email platform, social media tool, or accounting software isn’t managed securely, it can expose your CRM to data breaches, compliance risks, or data integrity issues.
Secure integrations require a layered defense. Key practices include:
Encryption makes your data unreadable to anyone who does not have the authorized decryption key. By using encryption for data “in transit” (as it moves between systems) and “at rest” (while stored in the database), you ensure that even if an unauthorized individual gains access to the data, they cannot understand or use it.
Rate limiting and throttling control the number of requests a user or an integration can make to your CRM API within a certain timeframe. This helps prevent “brute-force” attacks and ensures that a single compromised or malfunctioning integration doesn’t overwhelm your system and cause a service outage.
A security-focused CRM like Nutshell provides built-in safeguards that take the guesswork out of protection. This includes “bank-grade” encryption (256-bit TLS), compliance-ready protocols (like GDPR and CCPA), and secure access controls. By using a platform that prioritizes security, you ensure your foundation is solid before you even begin connecting third-party tools.
Learn how Nutshell helps you integrate your tech stack & keep your data secure.
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