6 Mistakes to Avoid When Managing Company Data

Properly managing your company data is an essential practice when it comes to maintaining the security of your sensitive information. Unfortunately, many organizations make mistakes when managing company data, and these mistakes often lead to adverse consequences.

Let’s explore some of the most common mistakes to avoid.

1. Improper Employee Training

One of the largest computing factors to poor data management is improper employee training. This will create a situation where the workers within your organization may unsafely transfer key information.

Or, they may provide unauthorized parties with access to this information.

A common example could involve your employees using work-related passwords that are highly easy to guess. Instead, it’s in your best interest to implement an employee training program that establishes a comprehensive set of standards involving data management.

This will help ensure that you are able to minimize the chances of your employees becoming responsible for sensitive information being compromised.

Depending on the industry that you work within, you also need to train your employees regarding the access of particular data. For example, businesses that work with harmful chemicals must ensure that their employees are able to freely access safety data sheets.

You can visit this resource to learn more about how to improve safety data sheet management at your organization.

2. Insufficient Data Security

As you might expect, insufficient data security is a major issue when it comes to managing company data. However, this scenario is relatively ambiguous and could involve a handful of different factors.

For instance, just because your key data is protected by a series of passwords doesn’t mean that it is inherently secure. There may be issues within your network itself that hackers could easily exploit to gain access to key information.

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible for your internal IT team to recognize the areas that need to be improved. For this reason, it’s highly recommended that you outsource to a professional in order to keep your company as secure as possible.

3. No Contingency Plans in Place

Due to the fact that new cyber threats are constantly emerging, it’s essential that you have contingency plans in place. These are a set of actions or procedures that your company will follow in the event that a data breach occurs.

It should come as no surprise that forgoing this obligation could have a large number of adverse consequences.

If you haven’t done so already, prioritize formulating a course of action that your company can take in the event of a data breach. Even a short period of downtime could cost your organization tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, and smaller businesses may find it impossible to recover from a situation like this.

4. Use of Outdated Software

Using outdated software comes with a large array of potential security concerns. After all, there is a reason why developers constantly push updates to the software that they have created.

Unfortunately, hackers are constantly looking for new ways to exploit vulnerabilities within existing software. If you are using an outdated version of an application, there’s a strong chance that you are at risk of falling victim to a cyber attack.

Depending on the type of data that is compromised, you may have bigger problems than simply dealing with downtime. It’s not impossible for a hacker to leak the compromised information to your competitors, a situation that is particularly malignant if this data consists of trade secrets.

Hackers may also notify news outlets that your company has been breached, which can negatively affect the reputation you have among your customers. Put simply, using outdated software is a practice that is never recommended and should be avoided at all costs.

5. Unregulated Data Access

Regardless of the measures that you implement to protect your data, you’ll need to regulate the access that your employees have to it. As you may assume, there’s no reason for an entry-level employee to have access to all of the data that an executive does.

This means that you should implement certain precautions, such as multifactor authentication. For those who are unfamiliar with this term, it refers to using multiple criteria in order to grant access to particular information.

In practice, this could involve inputting a password and then typing in a randomly generated code that is sent to your employee email. When utilized correctly, regulations such as these can drastically reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

6. Improper Archival

It’s crucial to backup sensitive information so that you can regain access to it in the event that your access becomes compromised. It’s also good general practice so that you can establish a history of your company’s core data.

Interestingly, many businesses tend to implement insufficient archival when it comes to backing up their data.

You’ll want to ensure that your key data is kept within at least two separate locations in at least two different formats. In practice, this could involve keeping a hard drive in a locked room within your company’s main building while also having data stored remotely on a cloud server.

Managing Company Data Correctly Might Seem Difficult

However, the above information will help streamline this process. From here, you’ll find that managing company data is far easier than you anticipated, allowing you to properly safeguard the sensitive information within your organization.

Want to learn more useful info that can help you out in the future? Be sure to check out the rest of our blog.