Crimson Feature of the Month: Data Security

Data security is a big deal and nothing is worse than finding out your campaign database has been compromised, except... by reading about it in the newspaper.

Just ask Target who has one of the biggest and best customer CRMs in retail.

Target's Data Breach Just Got Much Worse

- Business Week

Neiman Marcus to Target Data Breaches Imperil U.S. Retailers

- Bloomberg

Three More Retailers Hit by Massive Cyber Attack

- International Business Times

As we are quickly learning, the wonders of big data go hand-in-hand with the responsibility of serious data security. We understand that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data is vital to your campaign's success.

I'd like to give you a peek behind our physical security curtain and show you how our headquarters is setup to protect your Republican committee. If you'd like to see all the steps we take to secure and backup your data, including:

• FEC Data Storage Requirements
• Crimson user authentication
• Credit card processing security
• Backups and disaster recovery
• Crimson platform, transmission and session security

visit cmdi.com/data-security/.

James Bond-like security

This is the fun stuff. Our physical facility has some of the coolest security features around.

Eyes in the sky

There cameras all over the ceilings of our headquarter's offices, hallways, and meeting areas. Why you might ask? We have "chain of custody" responsibility for everything that our clients send to our office. We need to be able to document who touched what at any time.

Once last year, a client was sure they included a substantial donation check in a package that was delivered to us for caging. Our security cameras allowed us to show the client:

• who touched their package,
• who opened their package, and
• the contents of the package when it was opened.

Unfortunately the client's check was not included in the package in question but now the client knew where to focus their search.

Biometric access

Our headquarters is divided up into very specific regions and access to each of these regions is controlled by a biometric access system. To move between any region of our office, your finger print has to be scanned and checked against our list of people who are authorized to enter that region.

This tight access control is essential for our caging facility. Caging is where we provide the service of receiving, processing and depositing the contributions that have been mailed to a campaign. As we are physically touching our clients donations, we need to track each contribution and who touches it as it moves through our caging process.

Note that the benefits of using CMDI for your political caging include our extensive knowledge of FEC rules which insures that your campaign gets its donated funds deposited as fast as possible. We contend with noncompliant contributions and the crazy volume spikes every campaign experiences. Our facility can securely process almost 100,000 pieces of mail a day.

Don't make a move!

Not only do our security systems watch everyone who is in the office, they sense your every move. Our HQ is filled with motion sensors that track the physical movement in our facilities. It is impossible for us not to know if someone is in a place they shouldn't be.

Shhhhhhhh! Loose lips sink ships

This is one of my favorite features of our HQ. Forget about noise canceling headphones. We have a noise canceling ceiling. Installed above our ceiling tiles are noise canceling speakers that pump out white noise especially configured for our spaces. This white noise masks conversations between co-works making it far easier to keep conversations private. We've found this system to be far more practical than Control's Cone of Silence.

This feature of our HQ is a great example of how seriously we take security and privacy.

Lasers!

Lasers are cool. Unfortunately they are not part of our HQ security system... but I wish they were.

Even though we don't have lasers, trust CMDI to take all reasonable steps to protect our clients and their mission critical data.

If you would like to learn more about about our security and backup processes, let us know. It would be our pleasure to do a deep dive in how we protect your digital assets.