Working on a business valuation means accessing your clients’ most sensitive, precious information—which they’re trusting you to keep secure and private. With great access comes great responsibility.
And with great responsibility comes great worry, and stress, and bouts of panic in the middle of the night. We know ALL about it. Some bad actor breaking in to steal a client’s data? My god. The horror.
Our solution to this nightmare-in-the-making: Build a fort, dig a moat, station the sentries. Hide the data deep inside.
Wherever your team works on client data—onsite or overseas—make sure they’re doing it behind a logged keypad entry and using company-owned laptops (obviously, right?) with encrypted hard drives. Access controls should be tight. Include multi-factor authentication whenever available.
For storage, keep things clamped down and out of reach, using your own secure servers or a heavily fortified cloud server like Egnyte, Sharefile, or Amazon’s AWS. Make 24/7 server and systems surveillance your IT support team’s prime directive, raison d’etre, and life’s purpose.
Above all, make sure there’s a culture of security awareness even beyond the guards in IT, at every level of your organization. Personally, we like weekly security trainings and periodic white hat phishing tests that keep the whole team on its toes.
Want to explore these and other data security strategies? We created Assurent Advisors to help keep our clients safe. Our laptops and other physical assets don’t contain any data, they’re hosted virtually, and they’re encrypted.
We’re happy to share with you what we have learned.