Data Privacy Day: Tips for Protecting Your Users

Today is Data Privacy Day (and Data Protection Day in the U.K.), a day set aside to focus on respecting privacy, safeguarding data, and enabling trust. Since its inception in 2007, this day has brought companies and organizations across the globe and different industries together to host events and raise awareness around data privacy. This is especially important in this post-Snowden era when mass data breaches and snooping revelations now drive the decisions companies make every day for managing corporate data.As Chief Security Officer at Egnyte, my priority is to provide the best levels of protection and security for our customers through adding and enhancing product functionality, enabling third-party integrations, and equipping companies with the tools they need to keep their corporate and user data protected.To help raise awareness around data privacy, I’d like to share a few best practices companies can implement to add an additional layer of protection:Educate your users. Provide tips and recommendations on ways to protect their data and accounts from common online security threats, such as Phishing, Brute-Force Attacks and Social Engineering. Protection is always easier than having to solve the problem after a breach. According to Information Age, it’s estimated that 80% of data breaches are caused by human error. Mitigate the risk by ensuring your users know what’s expected of them and understand the consequences of failing to protect sensitive data.Require secure access to your data and files. Egnyte partners with Duo Security to offer a robust Two-Step Login Verification system that IT admins can use to prevent unauthorized users from accessing intellectual property. This additional privacy layer means that even if a hacker gains access to a user’s password, he or she won’t get very far. Egnyte also enables protection at numerous levels, such as the file level. Each user can set strict permissions on who can access each file or folder, inside and outside of the company. From a corporate level, if an advertising firm has two competing clients, IT can set up two separate Egnyte domains to keep the two clients’ data separate and private within the one advertising firm.Know where your data is stored. If you are concerned about data leaving your country, keep your company’s data in “clouds” located in your region. For European customers, Egnyte offers a European data center to house your corporate data. In addition, if you don’t want your data going to the cloud, we offer an on-premises deployment option to provide behind-the-firewall, secure access without data going into the cloud. For all of our customers’ files, whether cloud-only, on-premises only or via our hybrid deployment, all data is encrypted in-transit and at-rest.Pass on Good Habits. Remind users to take extra precautions with their devices where work data is mixed with personal data (or in general for that matter). When walking away from the computer, log out, password protect it or turn it off. Similarly for mobile devices, makes sure a password is required for access, and if it’s lost or stolen, make sure IT has remote-wipe capabilities ready for those instances. It’s important to change old habits to keep a few steps ahead of hackers or other sources that cause security and privacy issues. Think of this: It is slightly inconvenient to lock your house or car every time you leave it, but it's a habit created to avoid being robbed. This should be the same for your users’ personal and professional data; it's worth dealing with a little convenience to protect it.Happy Data Privacy Day! What is your company doing today to raise awareness?