Confidential information is a valuable asset to any business. However, when you think about information security, the question that comes to your mind is how to handle confidential information in the workplace? This question poses severe challenges as to what strategies to implement and what amount of access to sensitive information should be granted, and to whom. In this blog post, we shall discuss a few strategies that you can use to protect your company's confidential information.
It is crucial to ensure that you have a strong password or other safety measures in place for all your confidential information. If it is easy to access, someone might acquire and transfer all this information via storage devices like USB drives or memory cards. However, if you use a good firewall on your system, encrypt your files, and change your passwords regularly, your digital data will stay secure!
As popular as online documents have become, most businesses still deal with a lot of paperwork on a day-to-day basis. If you need to dispose of sensitive documents, you should shred them or use a confidential waste bin. The threat of theft of confidential information, identity theft, and fraudulent practices is always looming over organizations that are not vigilant or are unprepared to combat these menaces. You should always assume any unsecured or partially destroyed waste document can be found by anyone.
If you need to destroy confidential documents permanently, a shredder should work just fine, but what can you do about the documents you need to keep at hand. The best options you have are lockable storage cabinets that only a few select people can access for such documents. To provide an additional level of protection, it's also a good idea to place the lockable storage cabinets in a locked room everyone cannot access.
Storing confidential documents in a safe place is the easy part. The real challenge begins when you need to move the documents from one secure location to another. There is a real threat to the integrity of the documents in question during transit. Ensure you use a trusted courier service or a trusted employee if the documents need to be delivered. For digital files that you need to share outside your organization, an encrypted email will do the job.
It's a reality that you cannot trust everyone within your organization with sensitive information. Unfortunately, employees are usually not motivated by spite or malice, but rather a lack of understanding about protecting data and neglectful habits like using easy-to-guess passwords or destroying documents before they're done working on them.
It is your job to make sure that your employees understand how to handle confidential information and why confidentiality matters. For this purpose, you should implement practical ways to keep sensitive material safe from prying eyes—such as securing your passwords in TrueCrypt files (encrypted) and disposing of any physical copies securely before leaving work at the end of every day.
When training your employees about data confidentiality, it's essential to consider both the technology and non-technology aspects. Doing so in-house may be more practical for some parts, but an external IT company can provide expert advice if you want assistance on passwords or phishing.
