Data Privacy Awareness - Risk and Compliance Management

Data Privacy Awareness
Managed WIFI Services Richard Grant Managed SD-WAN 1/16/2021

Privacy is the most important and critical part of any business. In fact, employees are the key source of any privacy threat. Maximum privacy risks are originated within the organization’s own workers.

Know what a privacy risk is and how to deal with it-

A privacy risk is an incident which could potentially lead to illegitimate use, access or expose of personal data, like personally identifiable information or sensitive personally recognizable information.

These guidelines are intended for all the organizations who have access to personal data. The Purpose of this detailed article is to outline the behaviors expected within organization to protect ourselves, our company and most importantly our client’s personal data.

Data sharing well-defined-

Data sharing denotes to the use or expose of personal data to one or more organizations or third parties. This includes sharing data with business groups or individuals, with data arbitrators, or with one or more organization.

Why securing information and data classification is important-

It is very critical to protect the data from being disclosed to people who shouldn’t have access to it, and to make sure that the level of protection reflects how important the information is to the company.

According to the information classification and protection detailed requirements, indeed we must have to classify and protect the information you are working with. Better to protect the personal data with encrypted password and make sure that password is sent separately NOT to the email with the personal data.

Official and non-official e-mails-

For the intruder, malicious email is the crucial method that attempt to compromise your systems and machine. If these attempts are successful, then this can lead to personal data being leaked and consequent holes.

As a best practice, only use your official email address while emailing personal data and do not add any other people in the email if they are not absolutely necessary. Also, never send personal data in the body of any email rather than putting the data into an attachment excel/word. We would highly recommend that if you are placing the data into the body, make sure that the email is rights protected to prevent printing, copying and forwarding it. Moreover, be very careful while checking unexpected emails, and make sure not to open any links or attachments unless you know they are appropriate. Sometimes people include sensitive information in their out of office messages that should not be used at any cost.

Be very precautious while working on remote-

Nowadays, almost every organization has given access to work remotely or from home. This activity carriages various information and privacy security risks for organizations. As we are aware that work from home settings do not own the same security controls and protections along with security measures as company does. We must follow the same security guidelines that apply for the organizations. Furthermore, official assets should be protected for any theft, misuse or damage.

Be more active with online applications Example: SharePoint, Teams-

Employees should more precautious while using online applications. They must ensure any personal data documents are encrypted password protected. Also, only the minimum necessary rights or access must be granted to required user to fulfil their role while sharing personal data through online tools such as Teams or SharePoint.

Purpose and limitation of the data-

We should ensure that the personal data can be used or processed only for the purpose well-defined at the time of collection. This must not be further used or processed in any way mismatched with that purpose. Also, ensure that people are collecting or storing the necessary amount of data including data protection and privacy controls.

Physical Documents-

Ensure, we do not leave personal data documents on any desk unattended. We should always lock away, destroy documents using a shredder or confidential bin after they are no longer required.

Make a habit of not leaving passwords on sticky notes, notepad posted on or under a computer, nor may they be left written down in a location which is easily accessible. As a best practice to restrict printing when strictly required and ensure print copies are destroyed securely.

Social Media Usage Guidelines-

Nowadays, all users use social media badly. So, it is very important never refer to or discuss details of any project related information on social media platforms which can lead to a critical data leak.

Meanwhile, if something went wrong and some classified information through social media platform intentionally or unintentionally has been shared. So, that must be immediately removed and that should inform to the respective security holders to clear such instances closely.

We should keep few key points in mind before sharing the data on social media platforms. Also, with anyone whosoever can be used in the sharing participants.

Does the data contain any personal information?

Does the data contain sensitive personal data?

Will the data cause any loss of business or leak of the project information?

Will the data be sent out of the defined groups or area?

How long will the data be stored at the shared location & before deletion?

In fact, data can play a vital role for any critical business loss/growth. Therefore, we should ensure that our data is secured enough at every point of contact during the sharing process. If the data is physical, ensure that we are securely deleting post the given time period. Also, take a close eye on every printed documents and shredder them after use. Moreover, use DLP and internal audit tools to make business communication secure enough. Ensuring respect to privacy of individuals and extra miles for the company.

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