Data Security – Are You Doing Enough?

January 28th 2020 is data protection day, a time to reflect on if you’re doing enough to ensure your business and clients data is being kept secure, and if it isn’t, what systems you should think of putting in place.

Use strong passwords

The use of strong passwords has been encouraged for many years, it’s nothing new. More and more websites are making it mandatory to use a secure password, but only against what they view as a secure password. Find what works for you. More importantly, ensure you do not use the same password twice – This way no more than one account will be compromised if your password is discovered.

Handle password securely

Try not to be the company that keeps its passwords in an insecure spreadsheet on a publicly accessible server. There are plenty of very useful password managers out there, some free, some cost. We use 1Password and recommend it heavily.

“Your 1Password data is end-to-end encrypted to keep it safe at rest and in transit. Our security recipe starts with AES 256-bit encryption, and we use multiple techniques to make sure only you have access to your information.” – Find out more at 1password.

Raise employee awareness

The best change you can make is to raise awareness amongst your employees and give them a better understanding of what is expected and how the deal with sensitive data within the work place. Challenge your staff to get on to each other if company expectation on data security aren’t being met.

Get training from a professional

To achieve the point before, it would be a great idea to hire a professional who can give you the ins and outs of what it’s important, give insight into scenarios where it’s gone terribly wrong, and companies that have got it right. We’re not plugging ourselves here – We’re learning as we go and trying to make sure we are as secure as we can be.

Make use of multi-factor authentication

Two-step logins are better than just a simple password. TFA offers you a way of ensuring that if you accidentally leave your password lying around, your account will still not be accessible. This reflects on our point earlier of ensuring you do not use the same password twice – So your other accounts cannot be accessed if a password becomes compromised.

Understand that it’s an ongoing process

Yes, implementing your processes to ensure data is secure is important, but learning to make these practises a habit is where you will gradually find yourself being fully conscious of your decisions of what you and your business does with sensitive information.

What will you be changing this data protection day? Will you be encouraging your staff or company to tighten their data security?