Tips for Safe Data Storage for Your Business

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

As a business, you have a sense of duty to keep your customers’ data safe. When they shop or work with you, they need to know you keep things such as their name, address, card details, and passwords secure. If not, there could be repercussions not just for those whose information is hacked, but for your business too. You could lose both potential and existing customers, ruin their trust, tarnish your reputation, and also potentially be fined by governing bodies. This is something no one wants for their company or customers, so we’ve put together some top tips for safe data storage for your business that you should take on board.

Why is safe data storage so important?

There are so many reasons you need to safely store your data as a business. This includes:

• You can tarnish your reputation and lose out on customers who believe you don’t have their security and privacy as a priority
• It can be costly if you need to pay fines for not correctly storing your data, or if you have to pay hackers ransomware to get your data back
• You can prevent data breaches 
• You can stop your website from being hacked and taken down which can cause a lot of potential downtime that can damage your business

Do Backups of Your Data Regularly

Daily backups of your data can ensure if anyone gains unauthorized access to your accounts, you won’t lose any valuable information. You should also have these backups in a few different places so that if one is inaccessible your business can still run and you minimize the damage and downtime that you might need to have otherwise.

Train Your Staff on the Appropriate Way to Use and Keep Data Secure

Staff training is vital when it comes to ensuring data is stored correctly. Organize a training day/ course for them to attend and don’t forget to send people on refreshers every so often as information can change. It’s vital you also send recruits when they start as they can often get missed. Include the appropriate storage of data and your processes in your employee handbook too and make sure everyone knows where it can be accessed should they need to refresh their memories or if they are unsure. 

Use Data Classification

When organizations are required to handle as much data as many of them are, it can be a big challenge to keep it secure while also locating it quickly and effectively. According to Forcepoint, data classification is the “continuous practice of tagging and organizing data into predefined categories, making it easier to locate and retrieve but also enforcing secure access for authorized users.” It offers many benefits including the fact you can tag progressively more sensitive types of data and determine automated security responses if anyone tries to access or corrupt your data. It’s steps like this that can make a real difference to your business’s security.

Implement Multi-Factor Authentication

If hackers or unauthorized users manage to break through one layer of security, multi-factor authentication can ensure it’s much harder to get anywhere. Multi-factor authentication could mean logging in with a password, but then needing to verify the login through a code sent to your pre-determined email address or phone number. The hacker would then need to hack the phone or email in question, which could also in turn have two-factor authentication. This all makes it so much harder to do and keeps data a lot better protected.

Always Keep Your Security Systems up to Date

Updates are always being released for security or data systems to keep them safe. It’s important that when these updates come through you implement them and don’t click the ‘remind me later’ option. Not updating can lead to vulnerabilities in your system and people gaining access to your site and data which could be prevented.

These are just a few things you can do to ensure your data is kept safe in the workplace. Data is used by all of us for so many things, it must be done in the right way. You want your clients and customers to know they can rely on you and you’re a reputable business. Incorrect data storage can lead to hackers stealing data, implementing ransomware, and accessing unauthorized information. By keeping your processes as tight as possible you can hopefully avoid this happening and keep your customers secure.