Are your Employees Keeping your Data Safe?
Imagine if you employees kept your business’ important data on a memory stick but managed to drop it in a busy street and then someone else, from outside of your business, picked it up, they will now have access to your business’ details. This person who has found the memory stick could then take it a step further and sell this data to cyber criminals, getting your business hacked.
Whether your business is a big organisation, like a police station, or whether you’re a small business with just 5 employees, your biggest security risk is probably your employees! How do you keep this data safe? Now that GDPR is now in force in the UK, your data is a lot safer, but to be extra safe follow our top tips.
Identify the Important Data:
You need to identify the information that you need to protect, this could be personal data from your clients, credit card details etc… When you have sorted all of this data you need to know how it is created, how it’s stored and then how it moves. Your data could be stored in the cloud, servers, emails or mobile devices but could move around in emails, through Wi-Fi or on a USB stick.
How to Protect your Data:
Encrypt it, if it is lost then it would mean nothing to anyone who finds it.
Make sure all your passwords that you use are strong.
Back up all of your data, so you have a copy of it if it goes missing.
Do all of your employees need access to this data? You could disable some USB or portable devices or disable the ability to download files so work can only be done through a shared area.
How to Control your Data:
Make sure you know who has access to this important data.
Have you got physical security in place?
Limit the access to this important data to whoever needs it, and when they no longer need the data terminate their access.
Educate your Employees:
Cyber criminals are always finding new ways to access information, which is why you need to be consistently aware of what threats there are. You will need to do more than one team meeting to make your employees aware of cyber-crime as they need to keep up to date on what to look out for.
