You worked tirelessly to get your business to where it is today and it would be tragic if your private corporate information gets leaked and your competitors got their hands on your trade secrets and business strategies. Who knows what kind of negative impact that could have on your business?
You also have confidential information that your clients entrusted you to protect. Failing to protect your clients’ information is one of the most effective ways to lose clients and prevent future prospects from doing business with you. A study by Gemalto found that 64% of customers are unlikely to work with companies that have experienced a breach.
So how do you make sure your confidential information doesn’t get leaked to the public?
Start by implementing these 5 best practices at your SMB:
Next time you want to connect to your local Starbucks, think again!
When you connect a work computer to a public network, your confidential information becomes vulnerable. A skilled hacker will require just minutes to gain access to the information you send and receive over the same network if you’re not careful.
If you plan to work in a remote location, be sure to connect your laptop to your phone’s hotspot or use a VPN.
Once a document or file has outlived its usefulness, is there still a reason to keep it around? If not, it’s best to use a secure method to trash it.
You might think some files will be used again in the future, but take a moment to think about it — because that’s the same mentality that hoarders have. They collect and collect until one day they realize that they should have gotten rid of their items years ago.
It’s time for a cleanse. Take a shredder to your outdated documents and delete outdated copies of files from your computers and cloud servers.
Information access is certainly important to your employees’ productivity, but they shouldn’t have more access than they need. If an unauthorized person or party ever gets access to an employee’s resources, it would mean there’s more data that can potentially be stolen.
Employees can also unintentionally leak information. Rogue employees may steal it.
By limiting the number of files to only what employees require to maintain their productivity, you can reduce the amount of information exposed if a leak ever occurs.
It’s not just the responsibility of CSO’s, CIO’s, CTO’s, or other administration to keep a business’ information secure. The secret to workplace confidentiality is actually the involvement of all employees in the workplace.
You’ve heard the phrase “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” It’s completely relevant to workplace security as well! Employees are the ones that will be regularly working with confidential information and if they don’t understand or implement the standard security procedures at the workplace, they will be the weak link that leads to a breach in workplace confidentiality.
Build a security culture. You’ll be glad you did.
Confidential files should always be shared securely but the current toolkit at your workplace may not provide the level of security you need.
You might think that when you send an email off, it’ll go straight to the recipient’s inbox but that’s not necessarily true. Emails travel from your computer to your email server, and then to the recipients’ email server before it finally reaches their inbox. At any point during this transit, the files and messages can be intercepted by hackers.
Consumer-grade cloud sharing platforms such as Dropbox or Google Drive won’t cut it either. And sharing confidential files by courier, fax, or USB is just as bad.
You need a secure file sharing solution that’s easy to use and encrypts information in-transit and at-rest so that it can’t be accessed even if it was stolen.
What makes a great secure file sharing solution? Make sure it has:
I’ve got great news. TitanFile already comes equipped with all of the features above and you can get a risk-free trial today.