Many busy parents who have lots to juggle turn to creating their own business from home. It gives them the freedom to work around other commitments, and it means they can stay home with their children if they need to. Running a business at home is the same as having an office, so the data you use must be kept secure for the benefit of your customers and your clients. Here are a few of the ways you can keep your data secure and separate from your household data.
Storing Your Data Securely
As a business owner that deals with clients and customers, you will come into contact with their personal information regularly. You may also be given confidential documents and information that will need to be secured and not allowed in the public domain. Having your business at home can generate its unique problems including how to store your client’s data securely. One way to achieve this is to use a separate computer or laptop for your work, drawing a line between your professional and home life. That way, other members of the household cannot get access to it by accident. You should also secure your laptop with a password unique to your business, not the same one you use for your home computer.
Use Passwords at all Levels
You might think that it is a bit extreme to require passwords at all levels of your data, but this is a good way to protect your information. If you are using a laptop, this can be especially important if you were to lose it while outside. You can set file level security on NTFS formatted partitions on your hard drive. That means no-one without the password can access the folders. If you also password protect the files themselves, you are adding another level of security.
Always Have a Backup
Computers and laptops can become damaged or simply become corrupted with a lot of use. For this reason, it is important to make sure you regularly back-up your data to a separate drive. The interval that you use to backup your data depends on how much information you are prepared to lose. If you deal with lots of data every day, then daily back-ups are the best answer.
When Something Goes Wrong
If the worst were to happen and you lost part of or all of your data, you should attempt to recover it from your backup drive. If you hadn’t backed up that data yet, then you will need to find another way to recover it. You can turn to a professional data recovery company that can help you to retrieve your lost information. You should also contact all those clients that are affected and let them know what has happened.
Dealing with business data, especially that of other people, needs a high level of security and diligence. It is important that you set specific protocols and that you stick to them regardless of the time it takes.
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