Today, data is everything. A virus or hacker attack, human error, power outage, loss of computer systems or a natural disaster can prove to be catastrophic for individuals and businesses.
Does your business follow an efficient data protection policy? Is your security methodology strong enough to protect crucial data from any sort of damage due to virus and other malicious software, human errors or purposeful plan to do so?
As crime rates are increasing, the security processes deserve more importance. It is an important issue for almost any company, big or small. They must choose wisely before opting for an appropriate method of data security.
It is also very important for an IT company to abide by the rules of the government.
According to the rules, almost every IT company should prove that it follows some methodology for protecting its confidential and critical data. If the company fails to demonstrate it satisfactorily, the government is free to take appropriate action on the company.
FSA is one such regulating body that keeps a check on the IT companies and ensures that they follow some kind of security measure to avoid data loss. Various policies were reviewed and new policies added keeping the present scenario in mind. In spite of the various policies and regulations, accidents do take place. Such an accident took place when the laptop of a nationwide company’s employee was stolen. Investigations revealed that the theft took place due to the low security of the building.
While FSA ensures data security, many regulating bodies ensure that the companies are making secure transactions online.
It is commonly called the PCI security standard. The payment card industry (PCI) standard ensures that companies that are making their payments online using credit card have taken some kind of security measure to prevent the loss of personal data. The PCI has established certain standards that the companies are expected to follow. One of them includes compulsory usage of a firewall, which allows only trusted sites and blocks the non-trusted ones.
One such international security standard is the ISO (International Standards Organization). It is popular as ISO 27001 in Europe. An ISO certified company has to follow all the standards laid out by ISO. An ISO certificate ensures that the company has taken high level of security measures. The standards laid out by ISO may cover personal data security, physical security and asset security.
A company needs to forecast the vulnerability of its system for efficient security. The weak elements of the company should be marked out and extra measures should be taken to ensure that they are less exposed to unauthorized access. A yearly audit and its analysis is must to effect changes in the security statement.
It is very important to publish the security policy and let everyone know about the statements and the restrictions of the policy. Non-compliance of the rules stated in the policy can lead to various undesired results, which may include the inability to access user files, etc. It may also lead to the automatic encryption of such files. Maintenance of security may include assigning a specific login and password to authorized workers.