Employee Awareness: Making your Business More Efficient and Secure

Dealing with these threats should be a priority for any business that wants to keep its competitive advantages and protect its data and intellectual property. With this in mind, below are a few different ways you can involve your employees to make your business both more secure and more efficient.

Go Paperless

While it may be hard to believe, corporate spies will go to all kinds of lengths to steal information including dumpster diving. Dumpster diving is a practice in which a person looking for sensitive information sifts through another party’s trash to find it. Eliminate this risk by transitioning to a paperless office. Doing so will also greatly increase your efficiency as well as lessen your office’s impact on the environment.

Lockdown Your Network

Have an IT professional help design your company network in a way that unauthorized access is made impossible through encryption. If hacking attempts are made, the system should be designed in a way to alert management of what occurred immediately. Make sure your sensitive data such as customer information, sales figures, blue prints, etc. are stored on a very secure server with backups in case of hardware failure. Make sure only the appropriate employees have access the appropriate parts of the network.

Security Awareness Training

Employees also need to be trained precisely on how to maintain security in your office. One of the best ways to start this process is to make a list of reasons for security awareness training, and why you should institute this sort of thing. Such a program teaches employees the importance of digital data as a company resource and trains them on ways to properly handle data and deal with security threats. If your employees must use information technology as part of their job, having them properly trained on how to protect your company’s digital assets is absolutely integral.

Institute a Clean Desk Policy

Another common source of corporate espionage occurs when employees get sloppy about how they manage documents at their work stations. Sensitive data may be left out in the open for any other person to see. One way to help prevent this and create a more efficient office is to institute a clean desk policy. This requires employees to keep their work stations tidy at all times and to keep documents stored away from where other employees can view them.

Overall, you need to involve your employees if you wish to protect your company’s data and intellectual property. Make sure employees are informed of your security policies and trained on how to properly follow them.

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