Every year identity theft costs businesses $221 billion worldwide.
That’s a huge amount of money, and it underlines the importance of protecting clients in industries where private information is required in everyday transactions.
While financial, insurance and legal industries are bound by increasingly stricter privacy rules and regulations, here are some specific security tips that can help reduce risk of data breach :
- Conduct information security assessments. Knowing how internal documents are generated, revised and stored can help identify security risks. Be sure to include both electronic and paper-based sources.
- Encrypt data. Smart phones, tablets and laptops are becoming standard business equipment for employees. As a result, it’s important to encrypt data on these devices just in case the device is stolen or lost.
- Introduce a shred-all policy. A shred-all policy means that all workplace documents will be shredded when they are no longer needed. Employees won’t have to decide which documents are confidential. Also, shredding documents is a 100 percent secure way of destroying them completely. (Remember, 56 percent of businesses in North America do not have a secure method of document destruction.)
- Don’t forget Electronic Media. When it comes to disposing of sensitive data, don’t overlook hard drives on computers or photocopiers. Erasing a hard drive does not guarantee that data is gone. In fact, physically destroying a hard drive is the only sure way to destroy any data on it.