Privacy Means Profit: Lock Your Business Docs
The following is an excerpt from John’s latest book Privacy Means Profit. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit our website www.ThinkLikeASpy.com.
Locking up sensitive documents is one of the most important and underutilized ways to protect company data. Of the individuals surveyed by the Ponemon Institute, 56 percent state that over 50 percent of their company’s sensitive or confidential information is contained within paper documents. Since 49 percent of all breaches involved paper, locking up what cannot be eliminated or destroyed is essential. To get you firmly into the business mind-set of thinking like a spy, start with this simple three-step classification process:
1. Classification: Set up a classification scheme. For example, you might have four levels of access: public, internal, classified, and top secret.
- Public documents are the only documents meant to be seen by outsiders (the public). This might include sales and marketing materials, websites, public filings, and the like.
- Internal documents are those appropriate for employees of the company to see, but inappropriate for outsiders. These are generally not high-risk documents, still it’s better to keep them confidential, just in case.
- Classified documents are a security risk if the wrong people see them, either internally or externally. Only certain employees and executives would have access to these documents (see step 2). Classified documents might include human resource files,customer lists, product development papers, department financials, strategy frameworks, and so on.
Secure Document Storage
SentrySafe Fire Safes
A majority of our most valuable identity documents (passports, birth and death certificates, wills, trusts, deeds, brokerage information, passwords, health records, etc.) are exposed to identity theft (and natural disasters, such as fire and floods) as they sit in unlocked filing cabinets, banking boxes in the basement, office drawers or out in the open, on our desks. I spend an entire chapter in Privacy Means Profit talking about which documents to lock up, which to destroy and which to stop at the source. To complicate matters, the problem of data theft goes beyond paper documents to digital media. More than ever we need to be concerned with the physical protection of hard drives, cell phones, thumb drives, CDs and DVDs with sensitive personal or business data on them.
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