How to Protect Your Business Against Data Leak

Did you know the average small to medium-sized business handles about 47 terabytes of data?

In the digital age, you have no choice but to run a data-driven enterprise. However, while this approach has significant benefits, there are also big downsides, including the risk of data breaches. In 2020, 28 percent of data breaches involved small businesses.

A data breach can result in a data leak, exposing your business to various liabilities. Confidential information in your care must never be exposed to unauthorized people.

As such, it’s paramount to have data leak protection measures in place. But do you know how to do that?

Continue reading to learn how to protect business data.

Don’t Start Collecting Data Without Security in Mind

A common mistake most business owners make is collecting data without having any data security awareness. It’s easy to see how this can happen.

Let’s say you want to start an ecommerce business. You have the product ready and the only thing remaining is to set up an ecommerce website. For customers to make a purchase, they’ll have to submit some personal and financial information, which will now be under your care.

What if a hacker targets your website after a few days and steals the data you’ve collected? This can happen if you let your guard down.

Therefore, it’s prudent to have data security in mind from the first day of business.

Deploy Secure Systems

Your business likely has multiple data collection points. This could be your website, blog, and even social media pages.

Every digital system that is involved in the collection, processing, or storage of data should be secure. In many cases, you’ll be using third-party services. For instance, when you’re creating a website, you’ll likely host it on third-party servers.

Be sure to choose service providers that put data security first. It won’t count for much if you build the best business website but host it with a company that has weak security measures.

Access Management and Employee Training

People (your employees) are the weakest link in cybersecurity.

You can have the most secure systems, but if a reckless employee accesses your company systems from a public computer and forgets to log out, for instance, your data can easily be compromised.

This is why it’s crucial to limit who among your employees has access to various sets of data. Design and implement an access control strategy that works for your organization and ensure your employees are trained on cybersecurity.

Don’t forget to create strong passwords for user accounts as well.

Proper Disposal of Electronic Devices

Computers, tablets, hard drives, and others devices belonging to your business hold lots of data. At some point, these devices will come to their end of life. You must dispose of them properly; otherwise, they could land in the wrong hands.

An ideal disposal strategy is to invest in an electronic shredder. This machine will shred your devices, reducing them to small bits that can’t be of any value to hackers.

Data Leak Protection Is Paramount

As a small business, you might think that you aren’t vulnerable to data breaches. How wrong! Small businesses are now a prime target for hackers. You have to implement these data leak protection strategies; else you’ll face severe consequences.

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