- Bowman Richards is the proprietor and president of the oldest and most trusted identify in shredding and destruction providers within the metropolis, Richards & Richards Secure Shredding.
The final two years have seen an enormous shift in our work habits — with many extra folks working from home than ever earlier than.
According to a recent Gallup poll, 45% of full-time staff within the U.S. labored from home both part-time or completely in 2021.
As this development continues to develop, employers’ data turns into more and more weak to compromise. In a conventional workplace setting, it’s simpler to maintain tabs on the situation of computer systems and different gear, worker web utilization habits and encourage different good company-wide safety practices, such because the protected disposal of paper paperwork.
With staff now accessing firm data from wherever they’re positioned — be it throughout the town, the nation and even internationally — it’s a lot simpler for dangerous actors to entry firm data.
With the annual Data Privacy Day simply passing, on January 28, it’s an excellent time for companies to take inventory of how properly they’re dealing with data privateness on this modified atmosphere, and what they will do to scale back their danger of personal info getting used, collected or shared. Here are a number of safety measures to remember:
Internet entry
If your staff are utilizing WiFi at home, encourage them to vary the identify of their home networks from the default that got here preset with their routers. Preset community names typically carry the identify of a router’s producer, which may catch the eyes of community attackers who may know easy methods to exploit the vulnerabilities of a specific mannequin.
Also, make it possible for staff change their WiFi passwords from the default setting to one thing safer — a minimal of 20 characters lengthy, with a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, digits and particular characters.
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If attainable, think about using a business VPN, which supplies a devoted IP handle and devoted server for all your staff, serving to to take care of a safe community regardless of the place your staff are positioned.
Physical safety
Burglaries are extra frequent than folks may assume. There had been 1.7 million burglaries throughout the nation in 2017 in keeping with a 2017 Department of Justice study.
Home safety programs and safety cameras can discourage break-ins, however solely about one fourth of house owners have them put in, in keeping with the research.
Though it might be troublesome to get each worker to see the worth of investing in a home safety system, employers can strongly advise common sense security precautions, comparable to checking to ensure home windows are locked and not retaining spare home keys in apparent locations.
File dealing with
Employees more and more use a mixture of private and firm units to entry firm data, which signifies that companies must also be fascinated by how they lock down that data.
Restrict entry to particular person information to solely these staff who use them straight. For occasion, retaining your most delicate info from being accessed by junior staff. Also, contemplate setting up different common sense safety measures to entry firm data, comparable to sturdy passwords and multi-factor authentication.
Data preservation
Technological requirements are continuously altering, corporations needing to protect data must discover safe preservation strategies. With data preservation, previous data is transformed to a sustainable format and saved in a particular repository, from the place it will likely be actively managed and migrated into new codecs as wanted.
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Secure deletion and destruction
When information and arduous drives must be deleted or destroyed, make it possible for staff comply with a safe protocol to make sure that data can’t ever be re-accessed. When deleting data off a tough drive that you just intend to re-use, discover choices for safe delete purposes— which overwrite the unique data with meaningless data in order that it could possibly’t be recovered.
If a tough drive or one other piece of digital media has change into outdated or is not getting used, make it possible for staff don’t proceed retaining it of their houses or, worse, attempt to get rid of it by simply throwing it within the trash.
Hard drive shredding, which makes use of industrial-level gear to chop the platters of arduous drives into tiny items, is the one method to make sure that the safe data on a drive is completely, irrevocably destroyed.
Data security is more important than ever, and within the new 12 months, it’s an excellent alternative for companies with distant staff to overview their safety protocols and ensure that their practices aren’t putting the corporate at undue danger. When it involves sustaining the energy of relationships with distributors and prospects, securing non-public firm data is likely one of the greatest issues a business can do.
Bowman Richards is the proprietor and president of Richards & Richards Secure Shredding in Nashville, Tennessee, the oldest and most trusted identify in shredding and destruction providers within the metropolis.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2022/01/31/protect-business-and-data-while-working-from-home/9241131002/