Eight Steps to Protect Your Business at Christmas
A Cheshire businessman outlines eight ways to safeguard your business over Christmas and New Year.
Online, December 18, 2013 (Newswire.com) - Christmas and New Year are quiet periods for employers but it is important that you do not let your guard down.
That is according to Tom Gilruth, Managing Director at Topwood Ltd.
He says: "Over the Christmas period do not leave information where it can be seen by prying eyes when the offices are lightly staffed.
"Data breaches are now considered a risk in virtually every workplace and trends show increases in both severity and in the frequency of breaches. It is important to tighten security across the board. Document management is a great place to start."
Mr Gilruth has some top tips and here are some essential components - and best practices - for document management.
1. Create a culture of information security with a clear document management policy.
2. Stay up-to-date about data protection laws. The Information Commissioner's Office can impose severe fines for breaches of data laws.
3. Schedule regular employee training in this area.
4. Map the information cycle in your organisation (from data generation to destruction) to identify security risks - and create data security strategies for each risk.
5. Create a system that ensures all sensitive information that must be kept on file is protected and locked up with limited employee access.
6. Create document retention and destruction schedules. Label document files by what they contain, how long they must be kept and when they should be destroyed.
7. Partner with a professional document destruction service like Topwood to have documents that are no longer needed securely destroyed and shredded. The service should provide a secure chain of custody with locked consoles for documents, secure shredding at your office, and a Certificate of Destruction after each visit. Check that the company provides a rigorous hard drive destruction service as well.
8. Implement a shred-all policy so that all documents that are no longer needed are securely destroyed on a regular basis.
Mr Gilruth believes that by following these rules you will have a stress free Christmas and come back to fewer problems in the New Year.
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