Online data breaches have become a frequent news in today’s print and electronic media. The victims have been some of the best known names in the online industry. Furthermore, there were instances of intrusions into the private lives of certain Hollywood celebrities too. All this was due to unscrupulous elements accessing important private data of these people through hacking their websites and private files stored on the net.

“Today, the majority of our personal and business information is saved, stored and transferred online on a frequent basis” explains Mark Dalton from The Tech Lounge, who provides IT Support in Berkshire for SMEs. “This brings us to the understanding that we need to be quite vigilant when it comes to ensuring that our sensitive documents shouldn’t be compromised by unscrupulous elements in the society. Of course, no one of us would like our private data being hacked by these elements, but the IT departments of small and large businesses also have a big part to play here.”

It could either be a sensitive legal document of a global law firm or a business proposal of a small business firm in Berkshire. The fact is that we should do our best to ensure the protection of these documents at all costs. This is why you should be extremely vigilant and on-guard at all times. There are some important steps that could be adopted in this regard.

1. Encrypt the Data

Data encryption has been active for some time now. In fact, it has been there long before the internet became popular. From hidden messages in ancient scripts to the protection of war secrets, data encryption has been active in adopting of various ciphers to hide the material in whatever document you are storing. In IT, this has been achieved by adopting an encryption cipher to the database which would make such data inaccessible to the people without a decryption code.

2. Keeping Track on Your Passwords

You need to make all passwords secure as possible by adopting certain methods. Your daughter’s birthday is not the best of passwords available out there. You definitely have a combination of letters in lower & upper case, symbols and numbers. This would definitely make it difficult for others to hack your system. You need to change your password at regular intervals for further protection. When you are protecting the security of the business database, make sure to include multiple layers of password protection for the best benefits of your data. Your Malware and Virus guards should be working at optimal levels.

3. Virus and Malware Protection

You should include the best virus and malware protection plan in your system in order to protect the sensitive data in it. Along with these actions, you should also make sure that your firewalls are functioning properly in order to securely control any incoming traffic that could provide a potential threat to your computer.

4. A Suitable Disaster Plan

Even though we give our best efforts to protect online data, there could be occasions when these methods become ineffective at certain times. This is the importance of having a back up plan in hand. Disaster planning should be effectively done by the IT department of a company. Storing data on a backup service, an external storage device or a cloud is one of the best things that could be done should there be a breach or breakage in the system. Such a back up plan will definitely help to prevent online data vulnerability in the long run.

The aforementioned are four of the best tips for online data safety. Using them will help save your important company data, and keep it safe.