5 Steps to Protect Your Company’s Data from Your Employees
Do you feel your company’s sensitive data is at a huge risk? Do you think your company can be a victim of insider data theft? Well, it’s time for you to take some serious and immediate action.
Quite often, we have seen companies and organizations spending millions on protecting their sensitive data becoming prey to cyberattacks and data leaks. This is true for several huge corporations, small scale companies, as well as political parties.
With cybercrime and insider data theft on the rise, it is possible for a company to lose its sensitive data to the outsider hacks and insider employees. To begin with, you can implement five ways to protect your company’s data from getting hacked or leaked. One of them would require you to install a monitoring solution such as Android spy software on your employee’s device to track their activity.
By implementing the three ways, you can secure your company’s confidential data from all your employees, even those who usually do not have to do anything with sensitive information about the company.
Educate Your Employees
First and foremost, you need to educate your employees about all the potential scams and cyberattacks that your company’s data could be exposed to. You need to make them learn to detect phishing emails. It is possible that your employees, especially the junior staff may not be able to recognize phishing emails and may click the malicious link by mistake. Even sometimes, you could fall for them.
Therefore, it’s imperative that you educate yourself along with your staff members on how to identify phishing and other online scams. You need to make them learn about the steps that they should take before sharing confidential information or entering login credentials.
Limit Shared Access to Sensitive Data
Ideally, a business owner could trust all its staff members with whatever data has passed through the company. However, this is something that could only happen in an ideal world. In real life, it’s not possible to trust your employees, especially those in junior positions, with the company’s sensitive information.
In past events, it has been observed that most data leaks occur due to the carelessness and negligence of the junior workers. It is because of them that data breaches occur in a company. They accidentally leak the login details, putting the company’s data at a huge risk.
Such mistakes are bound to happen. While you cannot simply fire them for such mistakes, what you can do is limit their access to sensitive data. When data leak occurs in a company, more employees, as well as even outsiders, can have access to the company’s information.
To stop this from happening, you need to make sure that you limit access to the company’s data to only employees and stakeholders who genuinely need to access that data. There is no need to share the data with employees who have nothing to do with it. The lesser the data is shared among workers, the better for the company.
Install Monitoring Software
If you think you have done enough by simply educating your employees on how to keep the company’s data safe, then you are wrong. Educating your workers is not the only thing you’re supposed to do when it comes to keeping the company’s data secure from data breaches and cyberattacks.
Your responsibility as an employer goes further than that. You need to install monitoring solutions on your employees’ devices so you can monitor their activity during office hours. Several employee monitoring solutions have been introduced in the market that can help you track your employees.
For instance, you can deploy Android spy software on your employee’s Android smartphone to see what they have been doing during working hours. The software helps you find out all about their activity including phone calls, text messages, web browsing history, social media activity, etc.
It also helps you detect the lazy and dishonest employees because once you catch them doing something that goes against the company’s policies, you can call them in and hand them their resignation letter.
Create Stronger Passwords
By creating stronger passwords and changing them frequently, you will make it harder for hackers and even your employees to access the company’s sensitive information. It’s important that you never share your passwords with anyone.
Always choose a difficult password so it is difficult for everyone to guess. In case your password is difficult, you can write it down somewhere and keep it locked in a drawer or cabinet so nobody can find it.
Here are a few tips on creating a stronger password: Avoid using all or any part of your name or ID in your password. Be sure to make them at least seven characters long. The password should be a combination of characters from different categories such as upper case and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.
Protect Data at Your Workplace
Make sure that you protect your data from others at your workplace. If you have to step away from your office or desk in the middle of a meeting that includes highly sensitive information, you need to take some precautions to secure your company’s data from visitors or any other person who should not be seeing that information.
- You can keep your workspace secure by adopting the following tips:
- Always lock your computer device whenever you step away from it.
- At the end of a business meeting, be sure to clean up your materials and leave no trace behind.
- After taking out a print, photocopy, or fax, be sure to carry your documents right away.
- Always make sure that you keep your sensitive documents and files in a secure location where nobody can reach.
- Keep an eye on your surroundings and always stay alert of any suspicious activity.