Why Personalized Videos Must be UltraSECURE

BY BLUERUSH | PERSONALIZED VIDEO

Personalization is a powerful marketing tool but leaves sensitive business information vulnerable when incorrectly handled. And that’s something no business can afford and a reason secure personalized video is so important.

In our data-driven cloud-based reality, the need to protect customer data is more necessary than ever. Just look at the effect any of the high-profile data breaches of recent months and years have had on brands: regulatory fines and lawsuits and long-term loss of customer trust. Many businesses don’t recover. BlueRush recognized this nearly a decade ago when we began developing IndiVideo. With the bulk of our clients in financial services at the time, we understood the profound need for strict compliance and uncompromising data security. Achieving that meant developing a different approach to personalized video. In this blog, we’ll look at how IndiVideo differs from other personalized video platforms. How it keeps our client’s data and customer information confidential, and how cost-effective scalability is an added benefit of this approach.  

The Risks of Typical Personalized Video

To understand how IndiVideo differs from other platforms we must first look at how personalized videos are typically created and why they can expose client data. When a regular, non-personalized, video is developed, it is rendered and shared with customers — no muss, no fuss. (But also, much less impact) The injection of customer data gives personalized videos their power but also can introduce a security risk. Typically, personalized videos are created by sending customer data from the company’s database server, safe behind the corporate firewall, out to a third-party cloud service where they are rendered, and then individual video files are sent to each customer to view. Sensitive customer data is now being sent to a cloud environment that must be secured and vetted to comply with the company’s regulatory requirements. For many organizations, especially in industries like healthcare or finance, the hoops that must be jumped through to allow data to leave the safe confines of the corporate firewall are extraordinarily high and time-consuming.  

A Better Way: Real-time On-device Rendering

BlueRush developed a more secure approach to this challenge. It’s based on IndiVideo’s unique ability to do real-time video rendering on the customer’s device. This was no small development feat; we had to create a lighter and faster, vector-based way to render personalized video, so it would require less processing power. After all, you never know how powerful the customer’s smartphone, tablet, laptop, or workstation might be. With IndiVideo data is passed directly from the corporate database to the landing page, on the company’s website, where the customer clicks to see their personalized video. It never traverses an unsecured cloud because it never leaves the corporate firewall. Not only does this mitigate the risk of exposing sensitive corporate or customer data, but it also results in faster marketing campaign deployment. For example, take a bank that wants to create a personalized video around mortgage renewals. The development of such a video might take three or four months behind the scenes, and then several more months vetting the cloud service on which it will be rendered. Meanwhile, competitors are moving ahead and making progress and happily winning customers with their mortgage campaigns. Because of IndiVideo’s unique UltraSECURE approach of rendering directly on the mobile or desktop, once the video is developed it can be pushed out immediately — knowing there’s no added risk. Also, once completed, the video can be templated to deploy future personalized videos even faster.

Cost-effectively Scalable

A side-effect of cloud-based rendering is the creeping cost of cloud fees associated with the personalized data being sent and the heavy compute power needed to render videos. Again, not with IndiVideo. Because all rendering is done on customer devices, cloud rendering fees are eliminated. This is a significant cost saving for organizations, especially larger enterprises, but even more important when one considers that many today use trusted third parties such as Customer Communications Management (CCM) companies to handle the creation of their marketing, customer correspondence, and billing. For these global CCM organizations, with many clients and reaching hundreds of thousands of customers, the cost of cloud-based rendering at the scale they need is astronomical. Not to mention the time they needed to potentially get approvals and vet security for each client around any personalized video campaign in which they might send data to the cloud. The CCM may have been approved to receive customer data, but that doesn’t mean it can leave their firewall.

The Security and Scalability Needed

Personalized video can build tremendous trust between brands and their customers, but that trust is quickly eroded with just one untimely (and expensive) data breach. Organizations need their personalized video platform to keep customer information secure, ensuring customer confidence, and to scale with their growing business needs. IndiVideo does that. IndiVideo is UltraSECURE.