Not all business owners are aware of the penalties which can result from failing to adequately protect the data which their customers and clients provide them with. These range from negative publicity and a loss of credibility right up to significant fines and lawsuits, so make sure that you don’t leave yourself unprotected.
- Re-Evaluate Your Encryption Practices
You should already be using encryption processes, but you still need to make sure that you’re doing so in the right way. For example, you may encrypt data at certain states but fail to do so when it is at others. The best practices will vary by business and industry, so it’s worth talking to an experienced legal professional to understand your exact situation. However, all companies which have not recently re-evaluated their encryption practices should certainly do so.
- Consider Data Loss Prevention Technology
If you’re in charge of a larger company, it’s certainly worth considering whether it might be advantageous to invest in a data loss prevention (DLP) platform for rules-based data monitoring and tracking. These technologies let you act as an administrator to automate and enforce the policies which govern the use and movement of customer data. For example, you might stipulate that any files including a bank number are not allowed to be sent outside the company. This means that employees cannot send sensitive data to someone external, accidentally, or otherwise. You could most definitely look at service providers such as Cyral (https://cyral.com/data-activity-monitoring/) who could help you in this domain!
- Keep Data Logs Longer
Many administrators choose to keep their data logs for only around thirty days. Instead, try to keep everything related to things such as firewalls and application servers for at least a year. This can be really helpful when seen from a big-picture perspective. In case you ever face a data breach in the future, storing these data logs could be helpful when carrying out digital forensic practices (visit the site of firms like Eide Bailly to know more on this front) to recover the necessary usable data, pinpoint the root of the problem, and come up with solutions. If you fail to do so, it will be hard to determine exactly what caused the loss of data since such incidents are usually not discovered until sometime afterwards. Keeping records for long also helps staff recognise suspicious behaviour, and you may be able to pin-point where someone is trying to breach your perimeter.
Failing to protect your customer’s data can have dramatic and far-reaching legal consequences, so make sure that protection remains a top priority.