How Securing Your Businesses Data Is Like Securing Your Money

All over the country, non-profit organizations, healthcare organizations, and small businesses are fighting to protect their data.

Data like consumer data, patient records, and financial information.

And progress is being made. It’s being made daily on how companies educate their employee’s on the importance of keeping information secure and private, along with the methods to accomplish these goals.

At digiSYNC, we’ve created a list to help you, the IT manager, on how to ensure your data is adequately protected.

#1 Protecting data isn’t only an IT issue.

Employee’s, owners, even some IT technicians often fall into the trap of believing that it’s not their responsibility to safeguard sensitive information. Often times, the general consensus is that keeping specific data secure falls squarely on the shoulders of the lone IT person that’s protecting it. While it’s important to have one person “own” certain IT processes, it’s everyone’s role to keep what’s intended to be private, private. The solution to this mindset is to view data protection as a responsibility of everyone. Everyone needs to own it. Establish this mindset inside your organization, first, and you’ve won half the battle.

#2 Keep current with your encryption tactics.

Encrypting data is critical, and encrypting data is still the only way of protecting data from those who would abuse it. Many organizations fail at encryption because they fail at keeping current with the quickly changing technologies of the IT encryption market.

For a great read about some basic, and more advanced methods of encrypting your data, check out this PCWorld article, here, about how to essentially encrypt pretty much anything.

#3 Consider data loss prevention platform (DLP).

We’ve established that ensuring the security of your business data is both your employees and your responsibility. But how can you monitor this data, detect and prevent potential data breaches, and take steps to automate this process? Consider investing in a DLP platform.

To compare the various platforms, check out this article by TechTarget.

#4 Retain data logs.

Most data logs for firewalls or application servers are deleted after 30 or 60 days. This is problematic because it can cause issues when trying to determine the cause of a specific data-related incident. One recommendation we’d make is to take the proper steps of retaining data logs for longer periods of time, as this will help you detect potential data breaches much more easily.

#5 Focus on privacy with your cloud partnerships.

Chances are you have a cloud relationship. And why wouldn’t you? Cloud is great. The myriad of benefits are immeasurable, like hosting applications, faster downloads of robust enterprise software, and redundancy to help prevent downtime. Having a cloud solution also exposes your healthcare organization, your construction group, or small business to a host of potential security problems. That’s why having a cloud vendor, who has dedicated privacy policies in place, is one of the most important factors when entering into cloud partnerships.

If you work in IT in healthcare or construction, and want some excellent cloud recommendations, check out this article, here.

Be safe, not sorry.

Now that you know a bit more about how to secure your business technology and data, learn more about how we can help. Email us here to learn more about how we can help your business make your data a priority.