3 Guiding Principles for Your Company’s Data Safety
You can never be too careful when it comes to data safety. However, creating your company’s data safety protocols isn’t always easy. When there’s nothing for you to work from, it can be easy to worry that you’re not covering all your bases on data safety, which can be very frustrating and incredibly difficult for your company. Data safety requires that your company understand what threats you need to focus on. Here are three principles that you might want to consider to keep your company safe.
1. Think About Your Company’s Value Chain
This can be a bit of a confusing statement, especially for companies that already aren’t used to considering data safety. Essentially, this means that you think about how your business generates revenue and think proactively to consider all the different ways that someone from the outside could disrupt the revenue chain.
The best way to do this is simply to think about all the different systems that come into play when a company engages with your product. Whether that’s through making a purchase on your e-commerce site, purchasing a subscription to your premium content, or scheduling a service with your company, think about all the different systems that handle information.
2. Put Yourself in the Attacker’s Point of View
This can be extremely helpful because it helps you understand what an attacker might want to steal in the first place. Would an attacker be looking for financial information? Would they be looking for a list of advertising targets? Would they be looking for extremely sensitive personal information?
Understanding the attacker’s point of view is crucial if you want to prevent attacks before they even happen. You want to make sure that the attacker doesn’t have an “easy in” that can make it possible for an attacker to grab information. Instead, you want to thwart these attempts early on.
3. Be Even More Careful With High-Risk Areas
There are some places in your company that will be more high risk. For example, say that you run an e-commerce shop. The purchase information in each order, like how expensive the order was or how many products the individual bought, is low risk. However, the financial information, like credit card numbers or bank account information, is very high risk.
You always want to put more effort into managing the high-risk elements of your business, especially when compared to managing the low-risk elements. You don’t have the time, energy, or money to protect everything equally, so protecting high-risk elements is always going to be the most important thing.
Conclusion
As you can see, data safety doesn’t have to be difficult. However, especially if you’re not used to managing data safety for a company, it can feel that way. These three guiding principles can help you move into data safety more thoughtfully. If you take the time to follow these principles, it can be much easier to keep your company and your customers safe with every purchase they make.