'Data drives operational efficiency 'states KPMG. Access to the right kind of information at the right time improves the decision-making capabilities of the team members; it gives them the confidence to respond to a situation with actions that are more in line with the overall organizational objectives. While business leaders are actively ramping up efforts to ensure that their employees have access to the right data so that their work productivity and efficiency don't get compromised, but at the same time they can’t allow unmointered access to information. This stems up a new challenge, i.e how to track the user data movement in their network. This challenge is more prevalent to businesses that operate through field services, such as a Pharmacy Business.
Tracking User Data Movement in Your Network - Understanding the Need
A pharmacy business is a networked business comprising distributed team members. For Pharmacy businesses, it is one of the priorities to build a well-connected data network for its distributed teams, including the mobile workforce, who are mostly on the move. Businesses are successfully facilitating data movement beyond geographical limitations by implementing IT resources like Could networks, connected devices, and tools like pharmacy management software.
But, as mentioned, this data movement can't be left off-surveillance. Tracking user data movement in your network is an important line of defense to keep your organizational data safe against breaches, at the same time it is the right way to ensure that your field team has access to the information that is needed for their operational efficiency.
Depending on the objectives of the company, it is important to implement stringent user data activity monitoring methods to identify the unintentional or malicious intent risks of data breaches. Tracking user data movement in your network is the much-needed proactive review to determine the ignorant or intended misuse of access privileges given to your in-house employees or the field workforce. New-age pharmacy management system software suites are designed with inbuilt analytics and tracking tools to identify the users' engagement with data over an enterprise network. As you implement the surveillance to track the data movement in your network, there are five things that you must keep into consideration:
1- Clearly define what is 'inappropriate user activity’ to your employees:
The purpose of user-activity tracking is to protect data or information while ensuring that the same is available for employees' use, but this usage is in compliance with the company's data privacy and security regulations. It is important to create a proper data security policy defining what constitutes “inappropriate user activity” so the users can have a clear idea of their access permission boundaries.
2- Deploy intelligent systems for tracking the user movement:
The purpose of this kind of surveillance system is not just to simply monitor the network activity, it must go beyond that. So, you need to set up a pharmacy management system that can monitor all types of user activities, such as what data they are accessing, what applications are they using, how are they collaborating upon data, their communication trails, web browsing activities, etc. For such detailed surveillance, it is important that your monitoring system can implement stringent tracking modules such as.
Log collection and analysis
Video recordings of sessions
Network packet inspection
Kernel monitoring
File/screenshot capturing
Keystroke logging
It is not that you mandatorily require all the aforementioned modules, but the more you have it's better.
3- Be open about user monitoring:
You must make your employees, even the field workforce aware that they are under surveillance and that their actions with enterprise data are being recorded and monitored. This will help them to prevent any unintentional or ignorant violation of the data security policy. Also, will encourage them to act more responsibly towards organizational data.
4- Don't let data tracking be a hindrance to accessibility, Wisley assigns the access permissions:
The purpose of having a cloud data network is to ensure that your mobile workforce and distributed teams can access the information needed for effective work production without depending on others. So it is important to ensure that access restrictions don't become an obstacle for them. Thus, make a thorough analysis of the role-based data needs of your employees. And based on that delegate the access permissions among your employees, ensuring that they can access what is needed, and at the same time, they are restricted from accessing those activities that are not required for their work.
5- Strengthen the surveillance around sensitive data:
Sensitive data needs to be protected with extra care, and this calls for more stringent surveillance of sensitive data. The best practice for this is to create strong authentication procedures, such as two or multi-factor authentication, for those privileged accounts who are given access permissions to sensitive data. In addition to that, organizations should enforce data protection policies and instructions to outlining acceptable use of sensitive data, such as how to handle sensitive data, which services and applications are authorized.
Conclusion
Pharmacy business is powered by its mobile workforce and distributed team, and thus a connected data network is necessary for smooth business processing, but lack of visibility into how your users are accessing and utilizing the enterprise data can lead to major data risks. Thus, it is important to include data-movement tracking in your field service management practices. A custom-built cloud-based best pharmacy management software with tracking modules can be the comprehensive solution to facilitate data accessibility as well as data usage surveillance. Also, it is important to conduct information security awareness programs to educate the users on the company's data monitoring policies and cybersecurity habits in general.