Businesses today handle all kinds of data, much of it personal in nature. Consumers have seen a number of corporations behaving carelessly with their personal data, making it more important than ever that businesses redouble their data protection efforts with help from companies such as can be found at https://cyral.com/data-activity-monitoring/. Fortunately, good data security is easy with the right guidance and this list aims to show you a few ways that you can double your efforts.

Involve Everyone

Hiring a cybersecurity expert to protect your network is a worthwhile step to take in improving your data security. However, you shouldn’t rely entirely upon your IT department to keep your data safe. Digital security systems are so secure that it is often much easier to target the humans that use them in order to undermine them.

For example, the person you have manning the front desk is no doubt excellent at their job, but do they know anything about data security best practices? If not, could an attacker looking for information simply phone the front desk and manipulate them into giving them the data they want?

You don’t need every worker to be a cybersecurity expert, however; you just need to ensure that everyone knows how to spot the most common cybersecurity threats.

Use Password Managers

Passwords are important and most people understand how to produce a secure password. However, producing a secure password that combines different character types, cases, and numbers that is unique for every individual service isn’t realistic for most of us.

Password managers will generate secure passwords for you and will automatically log you in when you need to enter them. When you need to password-protect your data, a password manager will ensure that you have a password that is more or less uncrackable.

Use Access Permissions

One of the simplest and most effective things you can do to ensure that data, especially personal data, remains secure, is to only grant access to those who need it. Using access permissions doesn’t just prevent people from accessing data that they don’t need to, but it also limits the damage of unauthorised access to your systems and confines leaks.

Dispose of Storage Devices Appropriately

When you delete a file from your hard drive, the file isn’t deleted. Instead, deleting the file simply marks that bit of the hard drive as free space, meaning that your device can then overwrite the data. However, until the data is overridden, it can be retrieved by anyone with access to the right free software.

There are things you can do to make sure data is very difficult to retrieve, but the only way to be absolutely sure it’s gone is to physically destroy the drive. Businesses like EOL IT services offer data destruction using a variety of techniques. In the case of EOL, they offer an IT asset destruction service that includes a comprehensive auditing trail, giving you total peace of mind that your data is gone for good. They’ll even come and collect your devices from you, so you don’t have to do anything.

Back Up Data Regularly

It isn’t just data falling into the wrong hands that you need to worry about; you also want to avoid losing any valuable data that you hold. Fortunately, the solution here is a simple one – back up your data regularly and keep your data organised.

Data security is tremendously important for any business, not least of all because of the GDPR. Neglecting your data security can lead to severe financial penalties, as well as damage to your business’s reputation. Make sure that everyone in your business is following best practices.