e-skills UK Guide

Keeping Laptops & PCs Safe and Secure

Protecting your business data from prying eyes

A lot of small business data is private and confidential. For example imagine if your customer list or prospect data went missing and ended up with a competitor – your business could suffer a lot of harm.

As well as protecting the physical computer assets that you may have – such as server PCs and laptops it is also possible to secure data by using a technology called encryption. By encrypting your data you can prevent unauthorised people accessing it.

This technology can save your business considerable stress and financial loss. The intelligent use of good passwords has saved many small businesses a lot of time, money and grief.

Note: If you feel that the nature of your business exposes you to a high risk of data theft then consider taking advice from an experienced IT security consultant

Basic steps to protect your data

Most small businesses will have a small number of key documents that will need an element of protection. Typically this may be;

• Customer details in a spreadsheet
• Prospect lists in a spreadsheet
• Contracts and agreements in a word processor

Most other documents in the business will not need to have any level of additional security.

All of these documents can be secured using the operating system file security and by setting passwords on each of the individual files. This will prevent the files being seen by the casual observer.

You may decide to add different types of access such as read only. This prevents the unauthorised reader making changes to the data but they can still access it to read it. This may be useful for a customer list.

Some more advanced small business accountancy packages may have additional security built into the package. Proper use of this security is important to prevent sensitive financial data being read.

Additional data protection steps and the small business

Nowadays there are lots of tools and gadgets that can help you secure your data. The great thing about many of these tools is that they are transparent in their daily use – you do not need to worry about the data encryption or complex things such as that, it is done for you.

Encryption is an ancient science that has been used for thousands of years to secure data. With encryption your customer list data is processed by some rather clever software that turns it into something incomprehensible. Once it is in this state it is very difficult if not impossible to return the data to the original state unless you have a key to unlock it.

This way your data is protected.

Data can be protected by encryption both when it is sitting on your PC and when it is being sent electronically to a partner, customer or supplier. In reality very few small businesses are under threat of their data being read when being sent by email. The biggest problem is someone stealing a PC or laptop or maybe a USB pen drive.

Encryption solutions can cost from nothing through to £100’s, depending on the scale and type of solution you need for your business.

Here are some suppliers of encryption solutions;

DES

GUARDIAN EDGE

WINMAGIC

Note that legislation, called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act part III enacted in October 2007 has implications for businesses and individuals encrypting data. For further details take a look at the Data protection law guide 

Every small business needs to take care that their data remains secure from malware attacks, which can result in data being stolen. For further details on malware please review the Computer Viruses and Malware Guide.

You also need to consider data being stolen by those with legitimate access to the data. For a very small business with one or two trusted employees this may not be a problem, but as you grow in size you may find a disgruntled employee decides to leave with your customer data. This is a very difficult problem to deal with using IT as these people need access to this data to do their jobs. Imposing draconian processes and procedures is really out of the scope of many small businesses as they neither have the time, money or expertise to implement them. Being aware of the problem is often sufficient to deal with minor cases of data theft. Significant losses will need  to be dealt with by legal action.

Managing passwords in the small business

Inevitably you will need to secure some data using passwords, but how do you make these easy to use but also resilient?

Here are some tips to help you manage your passwords;

• Minimise the number of passwords your team have to remember
• Try and use good, memorable passwords
• Force passwords to expire at regular intervals so people have to change them (this protects you against someone learning other people’s passwords before they leave your company).
• Force passwords to contain upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers as this makes them more difficult for attackers to guess and automated tools to break.
• Force people to come up with passwords they haven’t used before.

Make sure the team are aware of basic password security measures;

• The need to keep passwords private
• The need to change default passwords in software and equipment
• No one should ask people for their password; and they have the right to refuse to provide it
• Do not write passwords down or include them in Emails
• Methods to come up with memorable passwords. A good one is to come up with two completely unconnected words connected by a piece of punctuation. For example: train+envelope. Now create a mental picture that features the words you chose; for example a train sticking out of an envelope. You might be surprised how easy this kind of password is to remember
• Being vigilant for any failures of password discipline.

Free security advice

Whether your business has been affected by crime or you are seeking preventative measures against crime, the Business Crime Reduction Centre (BCRC) is here to assist you, contact BCRC by:

Calling: 0114 275 1283
e-mailing: info@bcrc-uk.org
Visiting: http://www.bcrc-uk.org

Commercial suppliers

We do not recommend specific products or suppliers; instead we provide you with a representative sample which covers the range of suppliers/products available. You may choose to look at these suppliers or products but this is entirely at your discretion.