Documents and files generated by your business during such transactions, mergers and acquisition, sales and purchases and others are as vital as the business itself.
It is safe to say that your business data is the life of your business.
Business data could be as sensitive and delicate as the profiles of all your employees, payment information of all customers as well as the pros and cons of your business strategies.
Whichever one, losing out all these confidential information could be very disastrous.
Data breaches generally usually have fatal implications for businesses. This is why you need to know how to secure your business data.
Any individual whether your employees or external parties could be the weak link for your business data to be breached.
As a result of this, you as a business owner must ensure that your data is kept very secure from any potential hacks or leaks.
Unfortunately, data breaches could end up costing your business quite a huge sum of money.
Also, your business may be held liable for damages resulting from customers’ information leak.
Steps to secure your business data
As you have decided to take action to secure your business data, there are certain steps to follow and precautionary measures to keep to prevent both internal and external hacks on your business data.
Ideally, you should be able to trust all your employees with your business data such as customer profile and information.
In the first place, you employed them because they were deemed as trustworthy.
However, it has been known over time that major data leaks or document breaches come from employees within a business.
This leak from employees could be deliberate as in choosing t sell out your business’ data to another party.
It could as well be unintentional as in the case of an employee mistakenly divulging confidential data.
A major way by which you will be able to keep your business data safe is to limit the shared access and permission to it.
This means that only trusted and proven employees will be granted access to such confidential company data.
2. Install a security system
This safety measure seems very basic to the extent that many business owners overlook out. Installing a security system is an effective method of protecting all your business data from breaches.
For example, a security system such as SimpliSafe will keep your business safeguarded from individuals who attempt to hack your data from the outside.
It also ensures that all employees without the required permission do not have access to certain confidential data.
This makes it impossible for anyone to breach your delicate business data either externally or internally.
3. Upgrade to a Virtual Data Room (VDR)
Businesses are fast adopting Virtual data rooms that guarantee maximum data protection across all stages and processes.
A virtual data room (VDR) is an online repository that has a secure system wherein all your confidential data can be stored and organized.
Rather than making use of physical data rooms to store all documents from transactions and other processes, do make use of virtual data rooms as your business data cannot be hacked or accessed by unauthorized persons.
Also, virtual data rooms (VDRs) such as DealRoom and the likes allow you to safely communicate with an investing party or potential customers.
Data sharing in your business’ virtual data room is safe and encrypted.
Ensure that the right staff that needs access to particular business data are the ones granted the authorization. It would be absurd to have a new employee have access to all business data as that would be unsafe.
Your business should have a content management administrator who decides the level of authorization that each employee is given commensurate with their experiences.
The truth is, the right information in the wrong hands could lead to confidential data breaches for your business.
5. Create a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Policy
The new trending security policy, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) allows for employees to work with their own devices such as laptops and Smartphones within the premises of the office.
As much as this policy sounds good, the fact that that not all employees have strong encryption networks on their devices may lead to data breaches in your business.
It creates room for unauthorized access to your vital business data as malware.
So, it is expedient that your business has a strict BYOD policy by which sensitive and confidential data are kept securely in your employees’ devices without unauthorized third-party hacks.
Part of the strict BYOD policy is to make it mandatory for your employees to install and configure particular software that will ensure data security.
There should also be certain business regulations guiding the use of personal mobile devices within your business.
6. Use strong passwords
Most companies often neglect the importance of using strong password security for their data.
Using a weak password or one that is easy to guess will put your business data at risk of being hacked by unauthorized parties.
To curb this, ensure that all your employees are taught how to secure data using strong passwords.
A useful hint is that you make use of mixed characters such as letters, numbers or symbols while setting up your business passwords.
You may also enjoy the benefit of password management applications such as Sticky Password Premium that will put you through setting up a strong password.
As a matter of safety, all organizations and businesses need to adopt these data security practices to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources.
Most times, the top members of your business could be the target of hackers to get sensitive data from them. In other cases, the new employees could act as a weak link.
Whichever way, ensure that your business data is kept safe as each employee aims at keeping the security measures that will safeguard your business data.
Security awareness should be at the core of your business and you should ensure to instill the same in your employees.
