One common mistake made by new business owners is overlooking the importance of the data held by their entities. Take a second and think about it. What kind of information does your entity deal with? What risks do you run if the information falls into the wrong hands? Your employees' personal details, bank account numbers, customer card details, your firm's accounting information and compliance records are some of the few examples that should come to mind. In this piece, the focus is on helping you achieve data protection using practical tips. Read on to get your business right track:
Document Your Data Protection Policies
One of the secrets to running a successful business is process documentation. It sets the pace for the team's performance by providing a reference point for how you want to do things. New employees will also go through the documented processes to understand what you expect of them.
Data protection documentation requires you to classify action points according to the data handled by employees. Some popular classifications here are website security, privacy and security, network security, e-mail, fraud, scams and incident response or reporting. Each topic will have detailed information to guide your team and ensure data protection.
Enforce Password Safety Practices
Unique login credentials are often an excellent place to start for anyone who wants to enforce data protection in a business. They control internal access to information while making it hard for external parties to intrude into your databases. However, weak, stolen and lost passwords are a threat to your business's data security. You must enforce password protection policies such as mandatory inclusion of numbers and special characters, excluding the company name from the password and combining upper and lower case letters. It would also help to have a policy that requires your team to change the password every few weeks.
Firewalls and Anti-Malware Software
Firewalls should be a top priority for your firm when it comes to handling data. Their work is to monitor the outgoing and incoming traffic to block or permit the exchange of data packets. This follows specific established rules built to suit your network's security. Additionally, consider backing your firewalls with anti-malware software applications. These applications should support regular systems scans to detect and eliminate any threats to your data.
Plan for Mobile Devices
There is a shift in the modern workplace paradigm with many teams working remotely and away from the office. Therefore, it helps to include mobile devices and wearables like smartwatches and tablets into your data protection policies. Restricting access to specific company portals and platforms using such devices can come in handy.
For more information, get data protection officer training services.
Share30 August 2021
I'm not an expert on the world of business. But I've done a lot of research into it, in my own way. I'll be exploring some of those topics by writing about them in this blog. If you're a fellow business owner, or just interested in the subject, feel free to join me on this adventure! This blog will be populated with plenty of references to and quotes from all kinds of experts in a very wide range of fields. I won't be pretending that I'm the only one doing any research here. In my next article, coming soon, I'll be talking about our basic motivations as consumers and the impact this can have on the business world.