TOURISM DATA – A Treasure Trove?
‘Privacy’ is becoming a myth as many people and professionals lack proper security awareness. Everyone and everything that is connected to the internet is vulnerable to external threats. The number of hacks and breaches targeting businesses are exponentially and consistently growing, no matter the size of the business. This growing trend had led businesses to consider implementing safety and security measures to protect their data. One of the industries, which is considered a treasure trove for cyber criminals, is the Tourism Industry. Tourism businesses can vary on a huge scale, from agencies, hotels, to airlines. All these collect customers’ sensitive information such as passports, credit cards, vaccine certificates and the list doesn’t stop there. One such of an incident is the Marriot cyber breach which enabled hackers to get almost 383 million guest records which consisted of numerous credit card numbers and passport numbers.
Tourism Industries also tends to maintain and store various forms and documents to facilitate customers in different scenarios such as additional forms for people travelling with newborns, disabled people, people carrying special goods while travelling, and the list goes on endlessly. Tourism Industries provide and maintain employment opportunities to numerous amounts of people, and companies tend to save these employment contracts and information for extended periods of time. The employment contracts hold sensitive data of the employees, and they are preferred to be stored physically. By storing physically, they consume a lot of space, and they are hard to keep track of and these don’t contain any backups. Though some companies have moved to cloud storage solutions, they also require backups to ensure that there is no loss of data. In Tourism Industries, data is ubiquitous and the only way to protect it is through A2B.
A2B can offer organisations in the travel sector the means to safeguard and manage data. Businesses may use blockchain with ease thanks to A2B. With A2B, Tourism businesses can withstand against these cyber-attacks as they can add the captured data directly into blockchain of their choice. It’s cheaper than cloud and doesn’t require any backups which makes the process efficient and effective.
