Data theft is a big concern for businesses. No matter what safety, security, and preventive measures a business stakes, there’s always the risk of data theft or loss from a corporate network – either by hackers outside of the company or even from employees or other stakeholders within. While what exactly you should do so as to protect your datais common sense, forming a rigorous policy as a guideline for your company makes tremendous sense. From purchasing assets to using them in the right manner, a data protection policy can always help. Here are five guidelines you should follow to set-up:
What data exactly?
Before setting up policies for data protection, you’d want to define data you need to protect. There’s critical data, there’s redundant data, and there’s temporary data that you’d probably need to access or use once. It’s the critical data that you’d need to protect on priority. For most businesses, it’s the customer data – which could include demographic information, proprietary details of products and services, credit card numbers, sales information, company information, and any form of Intellectual property.
Data protection policies should start from here. From our experience, we know that some of the older companies don’t even have this data in one, secure place what with data strewn all over the company network (including employee desktops, USB drives, and external hard disks).
Monitor data use
It goes without saying that you’d need to have systems in place that let you know where your data is stored, when this data is accesses, how often – and with whom – data is shared, etc. Data monitoring isn’t a choice; it’s a mandatory operational, recurring process on which your business depends. Data monitoring ought to work across the network which includes e-mail, web browsing, social media interactions, document collaboration, project management, instant messaging, and virtually every aspect of communication – both internal and external – your business uses.
Enforce the policy, throughout
No holds barred. Deploy your data security and protection policy throughout the company and make sure all employees read it and then sign it. Including data usage, monitoring, use of data, confidentiality agreements, Non-disclosure agreements, etc. Ensure that your data protection policy also covers how data inflow occurs; how data is created; how data is stored, accessed, consumed, and shared. Needless to say, data security also goes into your policy.
Devices, virtual networks, and data
Most companies are now embracing change. A large part of this change has employees using mobile devices – in all its forms and functions such as corporate devices, VPN (Virtual Private Networks), Wi-Fi, and data storage on portable data storage devices such as USB drives, laptops, tablets, and external hard disks. Make a special mention on your policy with regards to use of data outside the secure walls of your corporate network.
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