Four Helpful Tips to Avoid a Data Breach

When it comes to data breaches, many of us feel as though we’ve put all the precautions in place. However, encryption standards won’t always protect our data. Don’t let a false sense of security convince you that your information is safe when cyber attacks need to be protected against in more ways than just computer security software. In reality, the best way to protect classified information is through a whole-organization effort that requires implementation from the top level down.

Most cyber-attack incidents cite “human error” as a contributing factor. These are mistakes that we ourselves make and not the result of a computer system, which is why we are going to explain some of the best business practices which are vital in protecting the security of your organization’s data.

What is information security?

Information security is necessary for nearly all businesses in some way today. It’s the practice of keeping company data secure. Companies use information security when transmitting, viewing, and modifying information in order to protect it from unauthorized users. It’s important to have protected information in a company, but it must also be capable of being accessed when needed.

Information security practices develop around the needs of an organization and are meant to keep company data private. Here are some ways to improve information security practices in your company:

1. Educate Employees on Best Data Security Practices
Educating employees who interact with company data is essential to protecting your business. Even if there is a skilled IT security director in charge, management should know that the duty of keeping data secure is not fully out of their hands; developing policies and procedures on how to prevent data breaches is essential to the process.

Educating employees both new and old on these policies and procedures is a critical step in keeping company data safe. By ensuring that management and employees fully understand all of the potential risks to your organization, you can prevent company information breaches.

2. Hire Well
Strong security starts with great personnel. That’s how the hiring process can be critical to a company’s information security. When recruiting individuals, management should be certain that potential employees understand the concepts behind both breach prevention and management in the event that a breach does occur. Thoroughly vetting employees with background checks is only half the battle; make sure that your business is in the hands of people who can be trusted by verifying references and providing plenty of data breach prevention and mitigation training.

3. Reduce Access to Confidential Data
Since cyber criminals can only steal information that an employee or organization has access to, one of the major ways to minimize risk is to limit data availability with these tips:

• Reduce the amount of employees who have access to confidential information.
• Don’t collect information that isn’t relevant to your business.
• Reduce the number of places where data is physically stored.
• Purge data early and often by employing a regularly scheduled shredding service.

4. Purge Your Data Properly
It isn’t enough to simply purge your data. Getting rid of sensitive information in the appropriate fashion is the real trick. Too often, employees think that they are getting rid of all of their data when they remove files that are located on their desktop. However, deleting files doesn’t actually get rid of them. Once files have been erased on a drive, they can still be accessed by an individual skilled in information retrieval through the traces they’ve left behind. The only definite way that ensures confidential information can’t be accessed is through a hard drive destruction service.

Call Proshred® Kansas City for Data Destruction You Can Trust

With the mobile hard drive shredding services offered by Proshred® Kansas City, every business and practice in the Kansas City metro area can protect their digital information from being stolen or used against them. Whether you would like our trained technicians to come to your business and pick up your hard drives or shred them there on site, Proshred® can meet all of your data destruction needs.

We keep detailed accounts on every drive that is shredded and when, and provide customers with a certificate of destruction detailing the hard drive serial numbers and the date and time of destruction. This serves not only to help your peace of mind, but also so that you have evidence your business is complying with any applicable state or federal data destruction or information security laws.

Don’t let an unexpected data breach catch you by surprise. For trusted hard drive shredding or paper data destruction, schedule a service with Proshred® Kansas City today: 913-203-1115.