The global femtech industry is in great shape these days, with steady annual growth having it on course to be valued at $1.186 trillion by 2027. 

Though this upward momentum is great news for industry business leaders, it’s important to remember that the rise of femtech comes with higher volumes of private customer data and a greater responsibility to protect it.

Studies show that some femtech apps have misused sensitive user data, so every femtech brand must adopt and maintain effective best practices for keeping customer data safe, staying legally compliant, and developing trust in their brand.

In this post, we’ll look at six of the most important strategies femtech brands can use to safeguard their customer data.

Understand Your Legal Obligations

As digital privacy has become a bigger and bigger topic in recent years, a regulatory landscape has emerged requiring all tech companies to adhere to strict regulations when it comes to storing and using customer data.

However, when you’re operating in the femtech space, these rules become far more stringent.

Healthcare is a strictly regulated environment due to the fact that businesses are handling highly sensitive data, and you’ll need to build a thorough understanding of your business’s obligations in this area to keep your customer data safe.

If, for example, your brand’s flagship product is an app for tracking menstrual health, the personal health data gathered on your users will fall under GDPR for EU customers, and HIPAA when you’re catering to users in the United States.

Becoming intimately familiar with all the key legislation that applies to your app and the rights of its users will give you a strong starting point for understanding the obligations your tech product needs to fulfil, and the tangible steps you can take to ensure you’re fully compliant.

Create and Implement a Data Governance Strategy

Data governance strategies establish internal rules and operating procedures that help to ensure your business’s data management aligns with legal requirements and industry standards, while also enhancing your brand’s data quality, cyber security, and operational efficiency.

Your brand’s data governance strategy should be clear and accessible to employees at all echelons of your business, especially those who come into contact with sensitive customer data.

This set of rules should include clear best practices on data storage, access, usage, and deletion.

While strong data governance is crucial for all kinds of tech companies, this is especially important for femtech businesses and other firms in the healthcare space, where seemingly minor mistakes can lead to customer harm and severe legal consequences.

By having firm guidelines for who can access sensitive data, best practices for data storage and organisation, and other important variables, you’ll be able to close off potential sources of leaks and streamline the way your business uses data for a higher-quality customer experience.

Practise Robust IT Asset Management

IT asset management is a set of practices that involves tracking all your business’s physical devices, data, and software.

With effective asset management practices in place, you’ll not only make it easier to organise your equipment and data assets but also help to prevent security vulnerabilities that could potentially put your customer data at risk.

Proper IT asset management is not only important when your data and equipment are in active use at your company but also when you retire pieces of hardware that could potentially be the source of customer data leaks.

Many IT asset management services specialise in securely recycling old equipment to guarantee the destruction of sensitive data.

By creating and upholding a system where you can track all devices used to manage sensitive customer data, you’ll be able to ensure that employees leaving the company or devices being retired won’t leave sensitive data vulnerable to leaks or attacks.

Ensure You’re Only Collecting Necessary Customer Data

When many femtech leaders wonder “how can you keep data secure?”, they may be coming from a standpoint where they’ve already collected far more data than their business really needs.

Data minimisation is a crucial concept you’ll need to embrace as a femtech brand, not only to make sure you’re keeping within data protection laws but also for the practical security measures that keep your customers safe.

If, for example, you provide an app to support women’s mental health, you might need to gather data points relating to your users’ general demographics and symptom tracking in order for the technology to function.

However, for the sake of data minimisation, you should make a point to avoid collecting unnecessary data like location tracking or personal information.

Enacting policies that ensure you’re only collecting customer data that’s absolutely necessary, you’ll both respect your customers’ right to privacy and reduce your business’s overall risk of a data breach and similar issues.

Carry Out Periodic Data Audits

Regularly scheduled data audits will give you an opportunity to review the customer data that you have stored, ensuring that this aligns with relevant privacy legislation, as well as your internal security policies and data governance strategies.

With a thorough audit of the data you’re holding, you’ll be able to flag any sensitive data that needs to be deleted, while also making decisions about moving data to more secure storage assets or updating your company’s security policies to reflect changing needs.

When you’re providing femtech tools where countless users can switch from being active to inactive or back every day, scheduling periodic data audits is essential for keeping your systems clean of outdated or expired data, and minimising the potential touchpoints for leaks, breaches, and cyberattacks.

Proactively Train Your Team

Any attempts to secure femtech customer data will only be as effective as the people managing these security measures, and human error can be a major source of security inadequacies for any tech company.

To minimise these kinds of risks to your customer data, it’s crucial to make time for regular employee training, including staff who don’t directly manage data.

Make sure that these training sessions are up-to-date with the latest legislation and general cybersecurity best practices, that they aim to help everyone understand why data privacy is important in the world of femtech, and the best ways to avoid falling victim to phishing, social engineering, and other potential cyber threats.

To reinforce the issues covered in your training sessions, you might want to follow this up with additional measures such as simulated phishing scam emails sent out periodically to your staff.

These kinds of tests and the data you collect from them can help gauge how effective your security training has been, and highlight any departments, teams, or individuals who might need additional education on cybersecurity.

Protecting Customers With Robust Practices

Though the rise of femtech has had innumerable benefits for women’s health, it’s important not to lose sight of the huge volumes of customer data that drive the industry, and the potential risk that this carries. 

By researching your obligations as a company, and fulfilling this with robust policies, maintenance, and training programs, you’ll be able to keep providing a great service to your customers while keeping them and your brand safe.

We hope this guide has given you a great starting point for reviewing your company’s relationship with customer data and planning your next steps towards safer, more efficient IT operations.