It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your laptop is?
It happens every day, in every Canadian city, big or small, laptops are disappearing from small businesses and the largest corporations at an alarming rate. Of course, these laptops aren’t going away; they are stolen at all hours of the day from office towers, small retail stores, and many other places our mobile work environments take us.
Small businesses need to understand that protecting and preventing these thefts from happening is an important key to business success; however, the laptop itself is not the most valuable piece of the puzzle. Many business owners don’t understand that it is their data, if not protected, that will sink their small business if it goes missing, not the computer itself.
How can small businesses today protect their critical business information from disappearing or falling into the wrong hands? Many small businesses struggle to cope with data loss. When businesses experience data loss of any scale, they may never fully recover, and the costs are astronomical. Costs range from intellectual property to the labor costs involved in recreating or recovering the missing information.
Here are some basic tips to protect your business from the pains of laptop theft.
o Office Security – Perhaps the easiest and most often overlooked solution to protecting your company’s business data. I see laptops left unsecured in the middle of the day. I’ve even walked into many corporations that didn’t have someone in charge of the front desk and roamed the halls freely unchallenged. If I achieve this in a business, imagine what someone who wants to cause damage to your business can do. It is essential to have someone to greet each visitor and no one is allowed to walk through your office without an escort.
o After Hours Security – Small businesses need to invest in the best physical security solutions to protect their overall business. Alarms and cameras are great solutions, however what about those who have access after hours? Your IT technician, cleaning staff and others. Have you done your homework to ensure that you have hired organizations that can be trusted to enter your business when no one is there to watch? What are your policies on access after hours? On many occasions I have gone to offices at night where cleaning staff have left a door open while attending to business, thus allowing anyone to enter the office without having to authenticate themselves first. Thus, bypassing your security solutions.
o Personal Security – I have personally found that laptop security cables are not the best solution for securing your laptop. I once had a client who had 4 laptops stolen and had their locking cables ripped out. The cables will keep the honest person honest; It won’t stop a pro though, if someone wants it bad enough. When you’re not using your laptop or at the end of the day, take it with you or store it in a locked drawer or other secure storage device. Also, close your office door at the end of your day.
o Call Home Software – There are many solutions on the market that can force a laptop to call home if it is stolen. This can help a business get an asset back, however what harm has been done if the reason it was stolen in the first place was to gather information about your business.
o Back up frequently – Back up your laptop frequently, many larger companies use expensive software solutions to automate this and ensure your critical data is safely stored on their servers. Small businesses can take advantage of some synchronization processes built into desktop and network operating systems to ensure that data is synchronized with their servers whenever someone connects to the office network. If your business doesn’t have a server, you can simply back up your data to a removable hard drive, USB stick, or CD/DVD. Backup and Backup OFTEN! I can’t stress this enough, you can never have too many backups.
o Prevent access: You can easily prevent access to your laptop by setting a BIOS or startup password, this will force the laptop owner to enter a password every time the laptop starts up. This is a good solution to secure access to the computer itself, it will not prevent someone from reading the data if you remove the hard drive and install it in another computer system.
o Encrypt your information: When a laptop is stolen and you have taken all other security measures to protect your information, your data can still be accessed and used on any computer system. Data encryption is available in most commercial editions of new desktop and some server operating systems and takes all the information on your hard drive and scrambles it, making it unreadable unless you have the unlock code. When a thief removes the drive and installs it in another computer and tries to view its information, it cannot be read. Always save your encryption code in a separate location on your computer.
What is your company willing to risk? Remember that many corporations that experience data loss are never fully recovered and recreating IP is time consuming and costly to their bottom line. Also, it never fully recreates the data back to its original state. The security solutions mentioned in this article are inexpensive measures and will ensure that your business data is safe. In today’s world of compliance and regulatory measures being put in place to protect shareholders, what are you really willing to risk if your data is lost or ends up in the wrong hands?