Stopping your Data Escaping
The amount of admin work I need to do is huge, in fact I seem to spend more time with my accountant sorting out the VAT than selling to new clients.
And then along comes another issue to worry about – keeping our data from trotting out the door with the latest disaffected salesperson to leave my team.
As a small business person I have been watching the news over the past few months with increasing amazement as organisation after organisation reveals stories of lost laptops, mislaid disks and nicked data.
What never ceases to surprise me is that most of these losses stem from people working inside the business. Forget burglars and robbers, we are talking about members of our own team that we interviewed and hired ourselves.
I’m not saying everyone is bad. Far from it.
But that is where the problem stems from. We have people that simply make mistakes, like putting disks of data in the post with out securing it or sending email messages to the wrong people. In fact in all my years in business I have only had a couple of sales people try and run off with data, and since then have certainly learnt my lesson.
So what am I doing to stop my data escaping?
First of all I am trying to set a good example by being careful with the business data myself. If I end up sending it out accidentally what kind of example does that give to my team? I took a look at the Business IT Guide and found a number of guides that give some pretty good basic tips about stopping my data going missing.
These included:
Keeping Laptop & PCs Safe and Secure
Securing your data while travelling
It’s surprising how simple some of these steps are, and after reading through the guides I realised that we had some holes in our security.
My two sales people both have laptops which they use for presentations and writing proposals. I had a look at one of them and saw how much confidential data was sitting on his unsecured laptop. We invested in some simple technology to protect this data so if the laptop was lost we could be certain it will still be secured. I also bought the guys a couple of those laptop locking cable gadgets so they could secure the laptop to a table when they were out and about.
Having done this I feel a bit more secure and less at risk. Now, where was that VAT return I was completing…
By: Mr BITG, Virtual Director, Business IT Guide
