The complex issue of data management is becoming an increasingly important focus for businesses in the UK, particularly with cybertheft continuing to pose a significant threat to entrepreneurs.
For example, an estimated 88% of UK firms have suffered data breaches during the last 12 months, while it’s thought that one small business is hacked on these shores every 19 seconds.
But what steps can firms take to manage their data more effectively? Here are some tips to keep in mind!
#1. Complete Regular Backups to Safely Store Your Data
Let’s start with the basics; backing up your data and creating a clear path to recovery are crucial if you’re to manage your customer’s information safely and securely.
Such practices are also arguably central to organic growth and development, as the storage of information and performance tracking measures that actively aid decision-making processes can aid any company over time.
So, you’ll need to embrace the concept of backing up your data, ideally in at least two secure locations. Cloud-based storage is increasingly popular, of course, while retaining key datasets on a separate hard drive can also create an additional and often crucial layer of security.
It’s also key that you update and backup your data regularly, while making this a central element of your corporate culture. This will create real-time protection and negate the worst impacts of data theft over an extended period of time.
#2. Standardise All Data Entry Policies and Comply with GDPR Legislation
Manual data entry is still a prominent way of creating information reserves for your business, but this creates the potential for human error to have a negative impact on your firm.
This can be at least partially negated by the standardisation of data entry policies, in order to reduce human error and eliminate the small mistakes that can have a catastrophic impact on your data management.
Creating this and a comprehensive training program for employees will certainly simplify the data entry process and create a greater sense of accountability, which is also important when correcting any mistakes that may lead to breaches or similar issues.
Such a policy will also help you to stay compliant with GDPR legislation, as you can build knowledge and understanding of this complicated body of data protection laws into your training and standardised measures.
#3. Be Sure to Destroy All Data Once it’s no Longer Needed
One of the central pillars of GDPR legislation is the correct treatment, storage and destruction of older datasets, with these requiring practical management techniques to handle correctly.
It’s particularly important that you safely destroy all data once it’s no longer required, and there are a number of different techniques that you can utilise in this respect.
One of the most comprehensive is ‘degaussing’, which refers to the use of a high-powered magnet to disrupt the magnetic field of a medium and destroy any data included within.
Data wiping and overwriting are also part of secure hard drive erasure services, and while both of these methods are slightly less comprehensive than degaussing, they can be used on a regular basis by companies of all shapes and sizes.
