Security is important, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of business operations.
We all have a responsibility to keep that data we own or are retaining on behalf of someone else safe from thieves and hackers.
But a new study has shown lots of business owners may be finding the ways of doing this somewhat bewildering.
Voltage Security looked at various firms to see how they were ensuring data protection was carried out by employees and its report provided some real revelations.
Some 40 per cent of companies said they had lost a sales opportunity because staff couldn’t get to the information they needed quickly enough.
However, 46 per cent of respondents admitted they had frantically tried to avoid losing a deal by bypassing security controls and getting at the sensitive information.
It seems to us that there’s a strange contradiction going on in many locations around the world – data is placed behind a brick wall so that employees can’t get at it at all (in theory) – but then it is suddenly released if the firm panics and realises it needs that data, whether it puts the whole organisation at risk or not.
More than half of those polled said they could gain access to financial, customer or HR information that wasn’t really necessary to them if they wanted to, while 40 per cent of managers revealed they wouldn’t notice if this had occurred.
But almost half said they struggle to do their job sometimes because they can’t access data they really do need.
Dave Anderson from Voltage Security said: Security can and should be seamlessly integrated into current business processes, rather than stand-alone functions that enable employees to protect information at all times.
"Deploying a data-centric framework will enable companies to protect sensitive information at all times, while still allowing employees to access, use and move the data within the enterprise as needed to perform their duties."
We offer data mining facilities at Dajon Data Management whenever we carry out document scanning for organisations. This means information can be instantly accessed in a safe way by employees rather than being held in such a restricted way that they can never look at it again.
It’s a happy medium between data protection and allowing people to do their jobs without restrictions.