Our modern world exposes us to a lot of different people and not all of them have our best interests at heart. The internet is a wonderful place, but it can also be rather scary when we are met with viruses such as ransomware. This is problematic because we can lose our data and most other stuff if we are not careful.

This is just personal data, what about data regarding our businesses and other sensitive data? There are ways of protecting our personal data and sensitive data, so here are the steps to take if you want to be safer online and offline.

Making an Inventory of the Data

Sensitive data can be anything from the data related to the work you do, such as intellectual property, whether art or code, to social security numbers and personal information of one’s employees.

Making an inventory of the data that one has, including everything needed for an office, job, and even in one’s personal life, will make organizing and securing that data easier. Depending on where the sensitive information comes from, who it relates to, it should be stored separately, whether on physical media or digital. 

Keep What You Need (And Nothing More)

Not all data is necessary, both physical and digital. The more data you have, the more you and the people around you, both employees and clients, can lose. Keeping unnecessary information can only pose a higher risk to both clients and employees. Check which information is necessary to be kept, from a legal standpoint, and keep only that. Check the software which keeps the information about things, to see whether the default options are set to something unreasonable, for your own business. The less data you keep, the less you need to worry about.

Keeping it Safe – Physically and Digitally

Even today, most data breaches are of a physical nature. Someone runs off with a disc or a physical copy of the data, such as a register. Keeping things under lock is the only way to keep them safe, as well as having alert systems which would alert you if there was a breach on the premises, such as an alarm, both a physical one, as well as one which would send you a notification or a call on your mobile phone.

Regarding digital safety, data should be kept on physical media such as discs, or hard drives which are not used other than when storing data.

NAS is also a solution, or a server that would store data, and which would be only accessible either physically through a local terminal, or through an administrator account, remotely.

These are some of the simplest ways of keeping your data safe, online and offline, and it all starts with choosing the right data to keep.