Tips to Better Secure Personal Information

Personal information is very, very valuable, especially in this increasingly digital modern day and age. This makes it incredibly imperative that you are doing everything you can to protect it in your business, whether it is your own or belongs to somebody else. Listed below are a few tips to help you better protect the data you’re responsible for.

Determine What Data You Have

You can't expect to be able to keep all of your data protected if you aren’t sure of its extent.

Thus, you need to identify everything that you have, taking note of how your storage is set up and where the kind of data that needs particular protections is saved. This is a great opportunity to reorganize your data storage strategy if need be, adjusting who in your business can access what.

What information do you collect for your business’ use - customer contact and financial information, including their credit card credentials? What about information do you collect about your employees, or any job applicants you’ve encountered?

Knowing exactly what kind of data you have, and how much of it you have, will be vital to appropriately allocate the security resources to protect it all.

Downsize Your Data

Once you’ve surveyed where your data is stored, you should look more closely at its contents with a critical eye. Is all of it really necessary for your operations, or are there other ways to accomplish the same things that are better for your data security?

For example, take customer credit card information: unless there is a real business-related reason to retain it, you shouldn’t. The longer you have this kind of data in your possession, the greater your risk of losing it in a breach.

As you are minimizing the data you’re keeping, you should also make sure that you are also limiting who has access to your data, even preventing your different departments from accessing data unrelated to their processes.

Defending Data

In order to keep your data secure, you need to consider a few things, like the format in which this data is to be stored... and how to best protect that particular format. Any sensitive files and such materials need to be stored on designated devices, with sufficient access controls to prevent unauthorized users from viewing or altering this data. The same needs to apply to any data you store in hard copy format.

In case of a worst-case scenario where your data storage is breached you also need to have the means to identify if this has occurred, as well as solutions in place to minimize the damage that can be done.

Macro Systems can assist you with all of the above, and more, when it comes to keeping your company’s data secure, especially that information that reveals personally identifiable details. To learn more, reach out to one of our professionals at 703-359-9211.