Is your data mobile?
In many cases employees are using both personal and company devices for their work. Many of these devices are portable: notebooks, tablets, and smart phones. Chance are that most of these devices often contain very sensitive company data. Probably the most important and sensitive data is related to your clients. Contracts, prices, account numbers, projects, and so on.
Do you know what data is your teams mobile devices? Are they company owned or employee owned?
There are ways to protect devices and looking at the statistics, upto 5% of company devices will get lost or stolen each year. It might not sound like much, but what would the cost be to your business if that one phone was lost and contained you client lists or financial details.
There is no shortage of problems created by the loss or theft of a mobile device. Data on hard drives and memory cards can be captured even when there is password protection in the operational system. The email server data is right there in the settings menu on smart phones. The file serverâs and cloud application passwords are saved in the browser which also can be easily captured.
What to do?
Users can be educated for obvious and non-obvious threats and basic device protection strategies. Hard drives can be encrypted and mobile devices can be forced to be password protected with the ability to be remotely managed and erased.
The goal is to make sure company data will not be breached by losing portable and mobile devices.
With employee-owned devices or Bring your Own Device (BYOD) it is important that private data and company data can be separated. What if that employee suddenly leaves, what happens to all the email that is already on their phone?
Protection of Data is important to just about all businesses and a couple of key things to consider would be:
- The data on all mobile devices should be encrypted
- Mobile Devices should be managed and controlled
- Ensure data security policies are implemented such as password protection
- Have systems to clearly separate personal and corporate data on BYOD Devices.
If any of this is raising alarms bells for you or you just need some more information or clarification I would love to hear from you and have a chat about how you can protect your businesses data.
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