Two Tools To Keep Your Data Secure
With any professional organization, information is gold. The ability to retain important documents and records about your company's transactions and important details about your customers is important. However, this same information can sometimes come back to haunt you, particularly if it ends up in the wrong hands. It's important that you take a proactive approach to keeping your information private and safeguarded. Familiarizing yourself with two tools for data security is a good place to begin this process.
Identify and Control Access
Make certain you have a process in place that both identifies and controls access to sensitive data, such as personal information, credit card details or financial records. Before any information is input into a computer system or filed in a storage area, make certain its contents have been identified so you know exactly how to store it. In terms of electronic storage, information labeled as sensitive should only be put into programs that are encrypted.
A regular word processor or spreadsheet program doesn't offer sufficient security. In terms of paper information, documents that contain important information should be stored in file system that can be locked. When it comes to controlling access, whether electronic or paper data, limit who has the ability to access this information to employees who have been background checked and actually need this information to complete a task. Limiting access keeps your data protected.
Professional Shredding
Another element of protection you should consider implementing are professional shredding services. For most businesses, paper data has a life cycle. After a certain period of time the information either becomes invalid or is no longer useful. Don't make the mistake of simply tossing this information in the trash. Take a customer's expired credit card information, for example. Although the card number is expired and can no longer be used, in the right hands, this number can be used to get personal information about the cardholder.
This places the customer at risk for identity theft and your company's reputation on the line. Professional shredding eliminates these risk because it destroys your documents. Most shredding companies, such as ABC Moving & Storage, offer you the option of sending your documents off for shredding or performing the task on-site using specialized and secure equipment. For especially sensitive information, on-site shredding is more secure because it eliminates the risk of the information being jeopardized during transport.
Make certain you are making an effort to keep your data safe. Your effort will be well worth the effort when you are able to keep data breaches at bay.