As the Idiom goes ”Every Coin has Two Sides”, and so is this idiom true for the Technology Advancement in today’s world. With the high rate of technological evolution there seems to be good things coming our way, but not to forget its evil side as well. A lot of awareness has been generated for internet data security post various incidents of data theft ranging from credit card frauds, personal information theft, security information thefts, so on and so forth in various parts of the world. It is true for both large corporations and SMEs alike are who are easy victims to such data breaches as they happen to possess many confidential business data which is critical and a loss of such information can be very lethal and disastrous for any organization, big or small. Equipping oneself with protective measures is the only way out from being victimized by such data thefts both from external and internal parties.
Data Security should be a practice and a priority for SME’s in keeping data protected from corruption, unauthorised access and theft. The main focus behind data security is to ensure privacy while protecting personal or client data and prevent it from falling in to wrong hands. It is very often seen that SMEs do not take data security seriously which often results in losing sensitive business data knowingly or unknowingly to unauthorised hands.
Data loss can be due to various reasons such as below:
- Sudden data loss – due to unknown reason (Eg- System crash)
- Cyber Attacks
- Natural disaster and calamities
- Intentional Breach
- Terrorism
- Internal Data theft
Hence Small and Medium Enterprises should focus on Computer security, backup-recovery, archiving, disaster preparedness and enabling firewalls and authentic licensed antivirus installations as their core priority as a part of the traditional IT improvement areas other than improving computing performance, increasing data storage capacities and IT cost reduction strategies.
As a secure method of protection against unauthorized access, SME’s must ensure their data is covered by multiple layers of protection, which includes the use of multiple passwords, along with digital encryption for critical data. Today Encryption has become a very strong security feature, recommended by every security vendors and is a must for each and every business. Encryption is a high security mechanism which uses mathematical schemes and algorithms to scramble data into unreadable text and hence is considered highly secure as it can can only by decoded or decrypted by the party that possesses the associated key.
Data losses can result in business losses, financial losses or revenue losses, Intellectual Property Losses, Patent losses, productivity losses and in turn can put a major question mark on the company by vendors and customers alike. Hence Data security becomes very critical in such circumstances where it poses as a direct threat to businesses.
Lack of knowledge and awareness about the measures against such losses often land these SME’s in troubled waters especially ignorance being one among the factors. One of the major aspect of data security is the internal company employees which due to the lack of proper knowledge falls prey to such instances, hence it becomes very crucial to educated the about safeguard of business information, information protection and implementation of effective data backup and recovery plans.
“Prevention is Better than Cure”
