How to Protect Your Company Data from Being Stolen?

A typical business processes an enormous amount of data - whether bank accounts, client details, product & business plans, balance books, and future strategies - every single day, which makes the task of storing it all a significant burden. 

While some businesses are larger than others, no one wants to have their confidential information sold, given to their competitors, or shared in public for all to see. Worse, if your bank details or other sensitive information is leaked, then you could lose an awful lot of money.

Furthermore, if customer data that they have entrusted to you is stolen or lost, the reputation of your brand could be irreversibly tarnished, with many customers losing trust in you forever. 

Unfortunately, data loss is scarily common in this day and age, so it has never been more important for you to protect your data from being lost or stolen. Simply having an understanding of what the most serious threats are and how you can deal with them is a giant leap towards the safe protection of your data.

Here is how to safeguard your company data from being stolen:

Data theft is often an inside job

One of the most shocking realities of corporate data loss is that it is often an insider threat. An insider threat means that the core of the data breach originated from an employee of your business or someone close to it with access to sensitive information. 

Although surprising, it makes logical sense because your employees are the people entrusted with your most private data every single day, having access to password-protected files and processing confidential information as part of their jobs. 

As a result, if you want to safeguard your data, then you need to look within your own organization first. This is not to say you should automatically suspect your own members or staff or accuse them of wrongdoing, only that you should be careful with who you allow to access certain files, accounts, and documents. 

This is because the more employees that have access to your data, the higher the chance of one of them either leaking it or accidentally sharing it.

The reality of insider threats is that a lot of the time, it is either due to a disgruntled former employee deciding to take their own back on your business for one reason or another, or a current staff member who either lost their device with company files on it, accidentally shared a document or suffered a phishing attack. You can learn more about insider threats here. 

Educate your staff on good security practices

In order to minimize the risk of data being lost or stolen, you should educate your staff on good security practices so that your whole organization knows how to keep data safe. 

This could mean that you teach them about common cyber scams, such as phishing, as well as how to create strong passwords and act safely online. This in itself will give you a fighting chance of minimizing data losses, especially from accidental insider threats.

Have a simple system for storing your data

One of the best ways to protect your company from its data being stolen is to formulate a simple, standardized system for storing the data. For example, you could make it a company best practice to use a certain cloud platform to store data or to notify a certain manager if access needs to be granted to open a certain document. 

This will keep your staff on the same page when it comes to data storage and ensure that it is always stored in the safest way possible. Also have a data recovery software in case you loose your data despite all efforts.