Regardless of the size of your business, whether you keep your customer data on your servers, in the cloud, or even in a spreadsheet, it is essential that this information is well protected. The measures you abide for this purpose reflect on your business and your reputation.
1. Inform your employees to protect your business:
Your security strategy, even a well-designed one, could be neutralized with a single click. Try always to educate your employees about business expectations, threats, weaknesses, and protocols for using data. To enhance security, you can also limit the number of people who have access to certain data.
2. Periodically perform a cybersecurity check:
Companies should periodically hire a GDPR consultant who will conduct cybersecurity audits to determine gaps, strengths, and weaknesses in their data management procedures.
3. Make backup copies of your data:
Since the operation of most businesses relies on data, it is important to have a system for backing up information and regularly checking that it is still meeting the needs of your business.
Businesses should back up their data daily, not only to the cloud but also to a hard drive. Regularly updating software is another good habit. In addition, you should regularly check the operation of the backup copies and ensure that they contain all the data you may need. Finally, make sure you know how to recover this data in an emergency.
4. Reassess your data collection practices:
Knowing your customers well helps you communicate more easily and better plan your activities. But you may be collecting and storing more data than you need.
It's a good idea to review your practices every year to make sure you're collecting the data that's relevant, using it appropriately, and storing it securely.
5. Know who has access rights and why:
When an employee leaves your company, ensure that they no longer have access to your information by resetting passwords. Have a strict policy about who should have access to your company's sensitive data and know-how often and why they have access to it.
6. Encrypt your communications, including emails:
Communications that include any personally identifiable information or personal health information should be encrypted so that their content is protected. Encryption keys should not be stored on servers, as they can be unlocked.
7. Appoint a GDPR consultant:
Your GDPR compliance consultant is considered the backbone of your company as he will help you protect all the data you have stored.
8. Install anti-virus software and keep it up-to-date:
Antivirus software is designed to protect you against all kinds of malware (like ransomware, Trojans, and botnets). Therefore, installing anti-virus protection in your company and updating it regularly should become more than just a habit.
9. Protect your network with a firewall:
The firewall has been part of the panoply to properly protect your company's data for many years. It builds a wall between your company's internal data and untrusted external networks, such as the Internet. The firewall intervenes upstream of the antivirus and is perfectly compatible with it.
10. Get serious about corporate passwords:
You must have seen this warning somewhere before, yet many companies do not respect it. The lack of this leads to a threat to your company's data.
In addition to using a password generator to create strong and unique passwords, you should also make sure to renew them frequently.
Never reuse an old password and never use the same password for multiple accounts.