Vigilance And Viruses: Getting Your Business Clued Up In The Protection Stakes
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Getting your business clued up in every single facet is the one thing that takes the most time to implement. From your staff, all the way through to your technology, this is what has to be done to make sure that your business is firing on all cylinders. The nature of business in the modern world now means that we have to be vigilant at all times. This means that we have to be protective over our data. Information is knowledge, and, of course, knowledge is power. With the vast majority of crimes in the Western world now taking place via a laptop, we need to know now more than ever how best to protect and maintain the health and safety of our business.
The first stage is something you can delegate. It isn't something that is related to technology. It is, merely, deploying good practices. In the UK, the data protection act was put in place to ensure that businesses take the appropriate steps to look after sensitive information from third parties, like customers. One of the rules is to make sure that data is disposed of in a safe manner. This is something that you can implement in any office by encouraging staff to clear up their desks at the end of each working day, and locking sensitive information away. Or if you are dealing with incredibly sensitive information, making someone responsible for checking data at the end of each day and disposing of stray pieces of information in the appropriate bins will help. In addition to this, making sure that you are communicating with your staff the consequences of lost data on a regular basis will help your staff to be more resilient and vigilant. If a company loses data or sensitive information it makes you look incompetent but it also will result in customers going to your rivals, losing you business.
The other aspect is, of course, making sure your technology is as good as it can be. With computer viruses mutating and increasing in numbers, you need to have antivirus software, malware security, and firewalls in place at all times. Having efficient antivirus software in place will help protect you from things like identity theft, questionable attachments from outside sources, and will help encourage good practices from your employees, such as recognising when a package is suspect or from a questionable source. While prevention is better than cure, if a data disaster occurs on a large scale there are data and disaster recovery systems that you can put in place. By working with specialist companies that implement these type of systems, you are making sure that you are putting the protection and recovery of your data above anything else.
Again, this is something that can be cascaded down through each individual team in the organisation to encourage better working practices, such as resilience and resourcefulness. By understanding on an individual level how each person is responsible for their actions when it comes to data protection, they can take responsibility for their actions effectively.
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