Your business may not be nearly as big as the Veterans Affairs Department but what happened to them can happen to you. How many laptops do you have in your company? What sensitive customer data is, right at this moment, on those laptops? Do the laptops have encrypted hard drives? Do all the laptops at least require a user to login to gain access to the system?
You should be thinking about the issue of sensitive data on laptops as well as on PCs, CD's, and flash memory drives. Here's how to get started:
- Determine what sensitive data you have in your company. Where are the customer records kept? Where are the contract documents, software code, sales spreadsheets, etc. stored?
- Determine which employees really need to have access to the various data sources.
- If the above data is stored in multiple places, maybe now is the time to think about consolidating some of those locations and putting all of the data into one or a small number of easily secured and accessible online systems.
- Make sure that all laptops are, at a minimum, protected by an user name/password combination.
- Look into making sure that all laptops have full disk encryption. Flash drives can be encrypted as well.
- Inform your employees, contractors, and partners of your data security policies and train them in how to handle sensitive data properly. If the people associated with your business do not know what your expectations are regarding sensitive data, they will not use the technology that you give them correctly. Training and sharing of expectations are key in the ongoing process of securing your company's data.
If you think about securing your data before it gets lost or stolen, you can avoid the kind of financial loss that the Veterans Affairs Department is currently facing. Even more importantly, you will be protecting the good reputation of your business.
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