Protect Data and Information and Keep Business Assets Safe

To spend time and money on data security and data protection is more effective than to spend time and money to remedy the economic and reputational loss caused by data loss, data breaches or data leakage, and in many cases, the consequence of data security breaches always lead to great loss in company’s finance and reputation, which will even make the business close down. We can say that to ensure the sensitive and confidential data and information secure is equal to protecting business assets safe. In fact, no matter what roles are you playing in your life or workplace, you need to know the importance of data security.

According to the US Cost of Data Breach Study, the average total per-incident cost of data security breach is $6.65 million. So now tell me how important you think the data protection is for your business, and how you will value the data protection for your business.

$6.65 million is real a great number of revenue for many businesses. This loss of revenue coming with the attacked resources and productivity may make some businesses collapse.

What kinds of data security dangers we need to take into consideration? Lost or stolen laptop, hackers, threatens on the Internet, disposal of documents on computer, and email. In order to prevent attacks to your business data and keep your files on the computer safe, you need to take data protection. For example, the folder protection software can secure your data in laptop outside the office. This kind of software allows you to lock files all in the laptop with passwords, so that the files in the computer can’t be accessed even though the laptop’s missing or stolen by others. With help of this software, the hackers or attacks from the Internet can’t enter the protected files either.

In addition, the admin should know that employees’ network management is also very important. The business should issue comprehensive company network security policy, and all the employees need to ensure all applications or programs installed on the computer are approved by the security policies. All the employees need to assure critical security updates and patches are timely installed. For the IT department, they should monitor the network of the entire company and detect abnormal traffic on the network that attempts to access company’s data. Other employees need to know that many malware or virus will invade the computer via website or email transmission. Therefore, stay away from the suspicious sites and never open any files attached to an e-mail if the subject line is questionable or unexpected.

Network protection and file protection will keep data more secure and safer, and the information security will ensure company’s assets security to some extent.

Employee monitoring is useful for company’s productivity and data security

Employee monitoring is a necessity for today’s Internet-based workplace. Since the Internet can effectively improve employees’ efficiency and provide more convenience with users to search and share materials, it has become a powerful aider on workplace. However, the misconducts or abuse of the Internet during working hours may lead to great loss for the enterprise. Employees may use the company resource and time to do things unrelated to work, or the some employees may leak company’s sensitive data and information via the Internet out of intentional or unintentional misconducts. The former situation can lead to low productivity and efficiency of employees and the latter condition may result in data leakage which will directly lead to company’s economic and reputational loss. In order to improve employees’ productivity and efficiency and to ensure company’s data security, the admin of the company can use enterprise computer monitoring software to manage and control employees’ computer activities.
Now many companies choose to monitor employees on LAN. Since employee monitoring can to some extent help administrators of the companies manage employees’ Internet usage and show admin the employees’ performance during working hours. In addition, employee computer monitoring can protect company’s assets- data and information from being leaked by employees.

You can find much employee monitoring software on the Internet. Most of the software allows manager to track the whole team of employee's internet activity. This software helps manager to know what employees have done on computers and some software even allows you to know what employees are doing on the computers. The employees monitoring software with comprehensive functions can tell employers who is surfing the Internet, who is now processing files, and how he/she is processing with the files, whether there’s someone chatting with friends on IM tools, etc. Employers can know and then alert the employees when they are found browsing sites irrelevant to work. Employers don’t need to stay with employees all the time, what they need to do is to sit in front of his/her computer and then get all information about employees’ computer activities from the screen.
Meanwhile, employee monitoring software with comprehensive functions allows employers to block some certain sites or applications on employees’ computers. The restriction of sites and applications can prevent employees using company’s resources to do things unrelated to work. Besides, you can also use this software to disable USB port use, which can reduce the possibility of data leakage. But in my opinion, disabled USB port may lead to inconvenience to employees who want to take work home to fulfill.

At the mention of computer monitoring software, many employees will complaint about the privacy issues during the monitoring process. Yes, it’s definitely a problem for both employers and employees. Employers are advised to make specific regulations about computer use and computer monitoring on employees hand-books, and all employees should be informed of the monitoring action. In addition, company should assign specific persons to monitor employees’ computer and the logs collected by the software can only be seen by supervisors or specific persons.