Data For Dummies – The Biggest Mistakes We Make In Data Protection

Posted on Oct 11 2017 - 10:09am by Editorial Staff

We can fall into a certain sense of laziness when it comes to protecting important information in our business dealings. When you are an entrepreneur, the protection of information needs to be at the forefront of your mind every step of the way. There are so many more hackers and ransomware specialists now that are able to bring you to your knees and potentially bankrupt you and your business. But we make a lot of mistakes when it comes to protecting our data, and the fact is that some people have no idea what they should do to best look after the welfare of this information. So, what are the worst mistakes we tend to make?

Not Understanding Our Data

A lot of businesses simply don’t know if their data is business-critical, or if it is sensitive data. We need to understand what purpose of the data is and where it should be stored. To do this you need to undertake an audit of your data, and once you understand the overall impact on your business, you can then start to develop appropriate levels of protection for the data accordingly, and make the most of the security awareness programs available to you. Undertaking an audit and looking at the worst case scenarios if this information was to be stolen, you can implement more resources to protect riskier data. But you should implement effective security methods for each tier of data.

A Lack Of Preparation

A lot of businesses think of that they can just install an anti-virus program, and everything is peachy. The best way to prepare yourself for any type of cyber-attack is to have a proper IT security strategy in place. Ultimately, every employee needs to know what security protocol is if an incident like this ever arises. A lot of people may view a standard IT security policy as something that is boring and not essential to the business and is merely a document that is left to gather dust. However, it needs to be a key part of how you can protect every aspect of your information. It’s not there to highlight what you have in place to protect your business, but also what to do in the event of an attack. It is your incident response document, and it needs to be treated accordingly.

The Basic Mistakes

A lot of people simply don’t change their passwords when they should, and they don’t know exactly what a phishing scam looks like. These are careless mistakes that people make way too much. A simple bit of education in your company will go a long way, and it’s important to make sure that your employees are on top of how to best recognize threats to the company’s technical infrastructure. And not just who they should report issues to, but if they can recognize what a potential threat is and what isn’t, it will save a lot of issues for everybody, so the relevant parties can address the problem.

It’s not just the fact that your business can suffer, you can also be fined heavily for failing to take the proper precautions. So think about how you protect your data, are you guilty of these mistakes?

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Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.