Insurance That Prevents Data Loss
Most of us have insurance for our homes, cars and life. Businesses have insurance against errors and omissions, general liability, malpractice, loss of business, and a hundred other things. We all have insurance against losing what is most valuable.
In our businesses, we store customer data, financial information, product designs, software code, strategic plans, contracts, budgets, employee salaries and a host of other critical information. Do you have an insurance policy that covers losing all that information?
Most businesses have backups of their critical data. That protects you if you have a hardware failure or if someone accidentally (or deliberately) deletes your information. How about if someone walks off with your information? It could be an employee who takes a document out of your organization on a USB flash drive. It could be a hacker that steals your intellectual property from an unprotected server. Or maybe someone takes a laptop that contains a lot of sensitive information from an employee’s car.
You need the type of insurance that stops the problem before it happens. The best insurance is to encrypt confidential data and files with a persistent security policy when you create them. By doing this you control who accesses the files and what they can do with them. By always controlling access, you don’t have to worry where the file is. If someone stores it in the cloud, on a mobile device or on their desktop, it’s protected.
Just like locking your front door keeps out most people who want to steal something from your home, encrypting your files keeps most people from stealing your information. The cost to your brand, reputation and ultimately your business can be much higher than the cost of replacing your information. Just as home insurance can rebuild your house, it can’t replace your photos that were lost in the fire or flood.
With insurance you have to wait until someone steals your valuables. With information security you can prevent theft from happening. What’s the better deal?