If you’re like most business owners, you’ve probably devoted a lot of energy to safeguarding your business’s digital data. Maybe even more so during the pandemic if you’re managing a remote workforce. Perhaps you were even the victim of the now infamous “Zoom bomb.” So, it’s likely you have a data security policy and digital data destruction policies. You’ve trained your employees on data security best practices. They probably know how to spot a phishing email, protect their passwords and determine if a WiFi network is trustworthy. It’s not just your training at work, either. Additionally, as the media continues to expose security threats that exist in cyberspace, your employees are probably diligent about maintaining data security in their personal lives. Hopefully, they bring that same level of care to the data they handle in their professional lives.
All of this is great. If you’re confident that you and your team are working together to protect your business’s digital data, that’s a huge victory. You could still experience a breach, of course; it’s impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that your business’s data will never be compromised. But combining digital safeguards with employee training and a comprehensive data security policy puts you in a good position.
Is your physical data as well protected?
Balancing Physical and Digital Data Destruction
Here’s my concern about all the attention on digital data security: Today, when individuals and business owners think about data security, I’m afraid they think about Zoom bombing, email phishing and the dark web—not about the possibility that an employee will lose a flash drive, laptop, or documents containing customer information.
The security risks that threaten your physical data don’t make headlines often, but they’re very real. According to the Ponemon Institute’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, physical security failures were responsible for 10 percent of malicious breaches in 2020. The average cost of such a breach was $4.36 million.
The coronavirus pandemic only exacerbated the challenges and risks associated with physical data security. Employers can’t oversee how employees working from home handle physical data like paper files and remote drives. Many employers had to loosen their rules about taking sensitive data out of the office in order to make remote work possible, potentially exposing that data to a physical breach. Plus, if you have fewer people onsite at your work location, your server room and storage facilities could be more vulnerable to threats.
How can you mitigate the risks of a breach to your physical data? One thing I suggest is reviewing your physical and digital data destruction policies with your employees. Data is especially vulnerable between the time you finish using it and the time it’s permanently destroyed. Your employees should already be familiar with how you want them to handle shreddable files and obsolete devices. But your employees have a lot going on, and data destruction isn’t a top concern most of the time. Offering a quick refresher every few months helps everyone keep that information top of mind.
I know that employers are grappling with a lot of challenges right now. Maintaining data security and enforcing your digital data destruction policies may not always be at the top of your to-do list. When you do have the bandwidth to assess your data protections, it makes sense that you would primarily focus on securing your digital data; your business runs on technology, after all. We simply want to urge you to bring the same level of oversight to protecting your physical data.
No matter how much unpredictability there is in the world, you can count on Northeast Data Destruction being here to meet your data destruction needs. Protecting the security of your business’s physical and digital data is as important to us as it is to you. How can we help? Contact us today.