Keep Your Files Safe with the 5 Best Practices for Data Security
In this digital era, data security is paramount. Whether you're running a brick-and-mortar business, an online shop, or a financial agency, it's essential to protect sensitive files and destroy those you don't need anymore. Keep your files safe with the five best practices in data security!
To this day, over 41 million Americans have had their identities stolen, and 15 million new Americans get their identities stolen every year.
To keep your data safe, both digitally and physically, you have to be extra vigilant. If you own a business, you have an added responsibility to protect the data of your employees and customers alike.
But if you use some data security best practices, you'll be able to keep everyone's information secure.
5 Essential Data Security Best Practices
These tips will cover protecting both physical data, and digitized data. Both are used to collect sensitive information about people, so both need to be watched over carefully.
1. Use Strong Passwords
One of the easiest ways to essentially hand your data over to hackers is to use weak passwords for online accounts. If you run a business, you want to both use and demand strong passwords from yourself, your employees, and your customers.
This means you should avoid these weak passwords and force yourself and others to use long passwords with capital letters, symbols, and numbers.
2. Collect Only Necessary Data
In both a physical and digital space, you should never collect more data than is necessary to do your job. If you don't need a customer's social security password, then don't ask for it.
There's no reason to hold on to data that could ruin someone's life if it gets into the wrong hands if you don't have to.
3. Give Administrative Rights to Select Individuals
Both online and "IRL" you should have as few hands on your sensitive material as possible. That means you should only allow a select number of people to access a database or a physical file room.
This will shield you from leaks and allow you to more easily find the culprit if something were to happen.
4. Implement Anti-Virus & Firewall Software
There are more ways for a hacker to access your data than through cracking a password. That's why you should implement system-wide Anti-Virus programs as well as Firewalls to prevent invasions of malware and other foreign digital bodies into your system.
Not only that, but you should make sure that all of your software is up to date. Hackers are always finding new ways to infiltrate your data, and the anti-virus software developers are finding new ways to protect you. Take advantage of that by updating your software.
5. Shred All Your Physical Files
There's no point in hanging onto old data if it's no longer of use to you, so you should toss ASAP. But you'll want to invest in a quality paper shredder to use before you throw away sensitive material.
This way, dumpster-divers won't be able to piece together any credit card numbers or driver's license IDs.
To really do away with your digital data, you can also invest in a hard drive shredder to make sure your sensitive stuff is gone for good.
Thinking About Investing in a Shredder?
If you've got all the digital forms of data security covered, but not the physical ones, you may want to look into buying an office shredder. We've got a great selection of shredders for every office size.
With a shredder and these data security best practices, your data will be undoubtedly secure.
