Outsourcing Data Entry in 2025: Key Risks & Security Tips

Outsourcing Data Entry in 2025: Data Security Risks and Solutions for B2B Clients

How to Turn Raw Audio into Research-Ready Insights Using Transcription and Open-Ended Coding

May 2025 | Source: News-Medical

For businesses looking to save costs, improve efficiency and scale, outsourcing data entry services is common practice. In B2B contexts where companies must review tremendous amounts of data quickly, outsourcing is a useful answer. Outsourcing presents many advantages, but with it come data security risks. Sometimes, with the help of outside vendors and services requiring sensitive data, businesses may accidentally expose sensitive data (including financial records, customer data, intellectual property, etc.) to unnecessary risk (that is a lot to lose). If organizations, business, or entities that outsource do not understand to protect data security on all levels, they run reputational risks including data breaches, loss of confidence in the organization, and possible legal action.

This article covers data security best practices when outsourcing your data entry. With the data security practices discussed in this article, organizations can decrease their data security risks associated with outsourcing while taking advantage of cost-saving and increased efficiency.

1. Choose a Reputable Outsourcing Partner

The first step to ensuring data security in outsourced data entry services is selecting a reputable outsourcing partner. The ideal provider should have a strong track record of protecting sensitive information and have the capacity to meet your business security needs.

Key Considerations:

  • Experience and Expertise: It is very important that you find a provider that has experience with handling data security needs in your specific industry. For example, healthcare organizations must take care to ensure that their outsourcing partner is HIPAA compliant, and finance organizations should ensure the partner is compliant with the relevant financial regulations, such as PCI DSS. [1]
  • Certifications and Compliance: Make sure the provider will comply with your industry standards and holds relevant certifications. For example, outsourcing service providers should hold certifications such as ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) and GDPR compliance. These types of certifications are a good indication that the provider has a committed data security program. [2]
  • Client Testimonials and Reviews: One of the best ways to evaluate an outsourcing provider’s security capabilities is to look at client testimonials and reviews. Look for references related to how they manage data security and how they respond to data breach incidents. [3]

Pro Tip: If you’re looking for reliable B2B data entry outsourcing services, Statswork has years of experience handling sensitive information, with certifications that ensure your data remains secure.

Implement a Clear Data Security Agreement

After you have determined your outsourcing partner, you will want to write a data security agreement. This agreement should outline the responsibilities of both parties when it comes to data protection.

Key Elements of the Agreement:

  • Confidentiality Clauses: The agreement should include non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that legally bind the outsourcing provider to confidentiality. This is to ensure that all sensitive data remains protected.
  • Data Ownership: Make it clear that your organization remains the sole owner of the data, and the outsourcing partner is merely a service provider. This prevents any ambiguity around data ownership.
  • Security Measures: Identify security procedures that the vendor will need to comply with. For example, data encryption, control access and secure transmission, which we will discuss further in a moment.
  • Breach Notification: The contract should have a provision where the outsourcing vendor has to email you immediately if there is a data breach. When a data breach occurs, there are things that can be done quickly to minimize the effects of the breach.

Step 1: Audio Ingestion & Formatting

The very first thing you should do to load it up is to collect audio files from all your interviews, discussions or focus groups. You can take all of it as .mp3 or .wav files, or even as transcripts as PDFs. As you collect audio files make sure everything is comprehensible audio, complete sentences, timestamped in some sort of order, and otherwise grouped with sorted metadata (speaker ID, session 1/2 number, …etc)

3. Ensure Data Encryption

Encryption can offer one of the most sound and effective protections for sensitive data when stored (at rest) or shared (in transit). Considering that data security threats continue to grow, it is critical that wherever you outsource your data entry, they are using current or up to date encryption techniques. [4]

Considerations for Encryption:

  • In-Transit Encryption: All data transmitted between your company and the outsourcing provider should be encrypted using protocols like SSL (Secure Socket Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security). This stops potential interception of data during its transfer.
  • At-Rest Encryption: Ensure that data stored by the outsourcing provider is encrypted on their servers. This provides an additional level of protection if a security breach does occur. AES-256 encryption is considered a standard for securing stored data. [5]

Implementing encryption protocols will help maintain confidentiality of data while in transit from one point to another and while it resides in storage.

4. Restrict Data Access

Restricting access to sensitive data is one of the best ways to minimize risk of inadvertent exposure. Access should only be granted to any employees or third-party providers who must access the data.

Access Control Strategies:

  • Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Use RBAC to ensure that only employees who need access to specific data can view it. This minimizes the chance of accidental or malicious data breaches.
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Use MFA for employees accessing sensitive data. This requires more than one identification method (such as a password and a fingerprint scan) to mitigate issues with unauthorized access.
  • Audit Trails: Maintain a complete record of activities involving sensitive data, including who accessed the data, when they accessed the data, and what activity was performed. An audit trail will identify suspicious activity sooner, leading to detecting a security breach much faster.

5. Regular Security Audits and Monitoring

To ensure that the outsourced provider is following your security protocols, it’s important to conduct regular security audits and continuous monitoring. This prevents vulnerability from being exploited by exploiting bad actors.

Best Practices for Audits and Monitoring:

  • Independent Audits: Employing third-party recommended security firms to conduct penetration tests of your outsourcing provider is recommended. Objective audits allow you to assess whether client security requirements are being followed. [6]
  • Continuous Monitoring: Use tools to provide real time anomalous monitoring of your outsourced partners systems. This should include monitoring for unauthorized access, priorities and security vulnerabilities.
  • Penetration Testing: Use penetration tests regularly to mimic an actual cyberattack and evaluate the strength of your provider’s security systems. Penetration tests are useful for identifying gaps in the provider’s infrastructure.

6. Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans

To ensure availability of your data, you need both a, full data backup and a disaster recovery plan, regardless of cause of data loss, of systems outage, or a security breach.

Some Key Components of a Disaster Recovery Plan:

  • Regular Backups: Consider specifying that your outsourcing provider perform regular backups of all data, as part of this plan, to mitigate the risk of data loss. Make sure the backup of your data is stored in a secure location (possibly in their own facility or a cloud storage solution with preventative security measures in place).
  • Disaster Recovery Procedures: Ensure your outsourcing organization has a disaster recovery plan. You want to confirm that, when and if a data breach or system failure occurs, the outsourcing organization has clearly outlined the procedures involved to restore data as quickly as possible, with the aim to minimize any downtime or loss of data.

7. Educate and Train Employees

Many data security breaches are a result of human error. Therefore, it is important to ensure that your employees, and the employees of an outsourcing provider, are properly trained in security best practices.

Training Topics to Cover:

  • Phishing and Social Engineering: Train employees to recognize phishing attacks and social engineering tactics employed by hackers against them for exploitation to gain unauthorized access to data.
  • Data Handling Protocols: Educate employees on data handling processes and training sessions, for example clean ways to store, access and transmit data.
  • Security Best Practices: Encourage a security aware culture that means all employees understand the importance of security policies and will report any suspicious acts in a timely manner.

8. Compliance with Security Policy

Compliance with security policies should be a continuous activity to ensure that your data privacy and security are being met to satisfactory levels. You must continually verify your outsourcing provider meets your expectations for protection of your data.

Compliance Checks:

  • Regular Policy Reviews: At least periodically review the providers security systems and policies to ensure that they continue to meet your business requirements.
  • Contract Enforcement: Conduct regular reviews of the provider’s security measures to ensure adherence to the data security agreement and identify any potential vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

Outsourcing data entry services offers many advantages, including cost savings and scalability. However, businesses must take appropriate steps to protect data that includes sensitive, secure information, as well as prevent data breaches. Companies can keep their data safe by selecting a reputable outsourcing provider, having robust security agreements in place, ensuring data is encrypted, establishing data access restrictions, and conducting audits of security measures on a regular basis.

At Statswork, we can help you with secure B2B data entry outsourcing, including web data extraction, OCR, and data automation services that provide you both security and efficiency. Please contact us today to see how we can help you secure your data, while optimizing your workflows in the process.

References

  1. Kumar, M., Meena, J., Singh, R., & Vardhan, M. (2015, October). Data outsourcing: A threat to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In 2015 International Conference on Green Computing and Internet of Things (ICGCIoT)(pp. 1496-1501). IEEE.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7380703
  2. Samarati, P., & Di Vimercati, S. D. C. (2010, April). Data protection in outsourcing scenarios: Issues and directions. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security(pp. 1-14).https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1755688.1755690
  3. Klosek, J. (2005). Data privacy and security are a significant part of the outsourcing equation. Intellectual Property & Technology Law Journal17(6), 15-19. k https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA133367589&sid=googleScholar
  4. Mahida, A. (2024). Secure data outsourcing techniques for cloud storage. International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)13(4), 181-184.https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ankur-Mahida-2/publication/
  5. Bhukya, S., Pabboju, S., & Sharma, K. V. (2016, March). Data security in cloud computing and outsourced databases. In 2016 International Conference on Electrical, Electronics, and Optimization Techniques (ICEEOT)(pp. 2458-2462). IEEE.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7755135
  6. Hamlen, K. W., & Thuraisingham, B. (2013). Data security services, solutions and standards for outsourcing. Computer Standards & Interfaces35(1), 1-5.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0920548912000414