Who has access to critical information in your company?
If you can’t answer this question with one single sentence, then it’s time act without delay. Only after discovering who holds the information and where, you assure the security of your firm. This may appear to be complicated but it could be simpler that you expect. Better to act on it now, than regretting that valuable information is lost to unauthorized people.
Here are 3 essential steps to follow when locating critical information of your business:
1. Map Your Critical Data
The first step in locating critical information is mapping. Start with going through data handled in different departments of your organization. Then, identify your staff dealing with crucial information and who they exchange it with. While doing this, keep the bigger picture in mind. However small the or fragmented the pieces of data are, they can contribute to large critical information clusters.
2. Identify Responsibilities and Obligations
Data protection is regulated by legislation, agreements, internal guidelines and different data protection provisions. When you are aware of these, you will be able to assess risks and understand your responsibilities as well as the ones of your company’s partners and vendors. With every document or piece of data, ask yourself “What will happen if this information is shared with the external parties?” Determine the importance of this data and the effect of leakage on your firm. And then get to point 3 of this article.
3. Define Levels of Security
Once you know the type and amount of critical information, you can start to define the needed levels of security and the methods. Using advanced technology, you can automate the identifying process based on the criticality of the data. Afterwards you’ll be able to plan the security by aligning business processes, (re)allocating the security budget and improving the corporate attitude towards confidentiality.
So, why do it now?
There is a big chance that your company’s critical information is spread around and you have no clue about the extent of it. There is no reason to ignore this fact any longer. Nowadays, there are smart technologies, based on artificial intelligence, that automate the process for you in the shortest possible time. They start with scanning complete databases according to keywords to locate the critical information. They then label types of documents to ultimately classify them. This way, AI helps you to control internal and external access to information because, only the authorized persons are able to see a certain type of data.
This post was thanks to Kriptos.
