Every business, large or small, has sensitive data to protect. For example, even a small retail company has documents containing employee personal information that must be legally kept confidential. Lost bank documents, etc. It is not easy to replace. Supplier and contractor agreements may contain trade secrets.
To prevent loss or improper disclosure of important data, Kaspersky experts share seven tips:
- Enable full disk encryption on all devices
Make sure you enable full disk encryption (FDE) on most devices where confidential data is stored or transferred. Encryption protects data on the device should it fall into the wrong hands. The FDE tool in Windows is BitLocker. The equivalent of this tool in MacOS is FileVault. FDE is enabled by default on most iOS and Android phones. Do not disable this unless absolutely necessary.
- Limit confidential data to in-office only
Another way that important data can fall into the wrong hands is if physical media, external hard drives or flash drives, is lost (or stolen). Ideally, this data should never be taken out of the office. If you need to export data to an external medium, you must encrypt it beforehand. For example, many small business security solutions support encrypted data storage in the form of a crypto carrier.
- Do not transfer unencrypted data over the Internet
Sometimes you may need to send confidential data online, by email, or through a file sharing service. We strongly recommend avoiding this whenever possible, but if you have to send it, at least encrypt the data in case someone else gets it. The easiest way to do this is to create a password protected archive file. Almost all archive programs have this option. After encrypting the data, send the password to the recipient via a different channel, for example, via a messaging application that supports end-to-end encryption if you are sending the information as an attachment to an email.
- Delete sensitive data you don’t need
- Encrypt backups
Backups are vital, but they can also be a source of leaks. Therefore, before creating backups of confidential data, you should put them in a cryptocontainer.
- Keep multiple copies
Store your data in several different places isolated from each other. For example, you can keep one copy of a file on your computer and the other on an external drive or trusted cloud storage service. We reiterate; Don’t forget to encrypt the files beforehand.
- Secure archive and crypto bearer passwords
Losing the password of an archive file containing important business data means losing that data. Store passwords in an application for generating complex passwords and storing passwords securely, such as Kaspersky Password Manager .
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