Is It Worth the Risk?
Whether you are in sales, servicing or consulting, your business is likely to collect, create, store and manage massive amounts of data and information pertaining to employees, customers, vendors, and operations. Any breach in these digital or physical records could be potentially devastating for you and your business. Not only will your company’s reputation take a hit, you may also lose the trust of your stakeholders and prospects. Moreover, if your business is non-compliant with the applicable state or federal regulations, or industry-specific privacy protection laws, you may be looking at hefty fines and expensive lawsuits. Is it worth putting your business at risk? Instead, wouldn’t you want to take every possible step to neutralize the threats of potential thefts, hacks and data leaks?
While large companies may have a full-fledged IT security team, formal policies and sophisticated technology, smaller firms may implement other low-cost measures to protect their critical records. However, at TITAN Mobile Shredding, we think that despite robust security measures, certain everyday work habits could dampen your efforts and put sensitive information in the hands of thieves and hackers.
Read on to understand how simple changes in your daily work routine could help minimize the risk to your business.
Healthy Work Habits Equals a Healthy and Secure Business
With awareness, sensitization and training, it is possible to ensure that you and your staff form healthy work habits in both, the physical and digital workspace. Here are some aspects to consider:
- Do you print a document and collect it from the printer only hours later, or forget to pick it up completely?
- Do you leave your desk unattended with heaps of paper strewn over it?
- Do you toss papers into the garbage or recycle bin by simply tearing them up, or dropping an entire stack or file directly into the bin?
Even if you have strict access controls within your work area, or strong physical security measures in your premises, physical documents that are not under lock and key are vulnerable to visual hacking and physical theft. Instead,
- Follow a clean desk approach.
- Be disciplined about collecting printed documents immediately.
- Be wary of intruders tailgating into your premises or accessing restricted areas in your workspace.
- Implement a formal document management and destruction policy.
- Create dedicated areas for disposal of papers before shredding them in-house or through a professional shredding services company.
Some of the other aspects that you may want to be careful about are:
- Maintain Online Hygiene: Be wary of downloading suspicious attachments, practice safe browsing techniques, and be cautious while handling confidential business information through a public Wi-Fi connection.
- Fight Ransomware: Regularly create backups of your digital files in order to safeguard your business against ransomware attacks. Don’t put off running security patches or application updates for later; the small delays now may lead to big problems later.
- Plan for Hard Drive Destruction: Don’t simply discard your old mobile phones, hard drives, and thumb drives into an electronic waste pile. Format the drives, and partner with a shredding company that has commercial grade shredders for secure destruction of the drives and other digital media devices.
- Create Strong Passwords: A 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) indicates that 80% of hacking-related breaches continue to be on account of poor credentials, such as compromised, weak or reused passwords. Ideally, try to set a password that is at least 9 characters long and contains a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Don’t procrastinate over changing your password at regular intervals.
Being cautious and taking precautions against potential intrusions in your physical and digital workspace will go a long way in securing confidential business information and keeping your business safe. You may even want to consider rewarding good behaviors and penalizing security lapses, in order to encourage habits that are good for the health of your business. When it comes to secure disposal of your paper and digital records, partner with a professional NAID AAA Certified company, such as TITAN Mobile Shredding. We offer routine on-site services, hard drive destruction, as well as media destruction, and specialize in creating customized, industry-specific shredding solutions.
Speak to our data destruction professionals at (866) 848-2699 or contact us online for a free estimate.
