Spring season is just around the corner. Now, it is the perfect time to think about spring cleaning your office and documentation. Along with that, your database should also be cleansed. Partnering with professional data cleansing companies can help clean outdated data. Even though cleaning and organizing seems like an overwhelming task, with a few tips and tricks in mind, you can organize your office in no time. Here are a few tips for spring cleaning your office.
- Break down any office clutters into sections and start with one area and work in small sections at a time.
- Store office files, notepads, and memos in filing boxes or paper trays. Make room on a bookshelf or cabinet for these paper storage solutions and separate papers by type such as “to file” and “to do.”
- Computer, phone, notepad, a few pens and a stapler should be within your arm’s reach. Most important or most current paperwork should be kept in the desk drawers.
- Clean out your email inbox. Read, reply, and delete emails that you no longer want. Remove unused icons from the computer desktop by filing documents away into folders.
Spring Cleaning for Your Sensitive Documents
Companies need to protect documents including any type of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Documents that contain critical data may include word processing documents, electronic spreadsheets, customer databases, financial files, human resources files, and accounts receivable/payable files. Exposure of this information through a data breach may lead to financial and reputational disaster for the owner and the business.
It is necessary to train the staff on security protocols. The staff should be trained on how to securely handle documents and devices to keep the business protected. Shred-it’s State of the Industry Report says that employee negligence is the main cause of data breaches. In fact, minor mistakes may lead to serious consequences including data breaches and identity theft. It is the duty of business owners to safeguard all business, customer and employee data within the organization.
The following are a few tips to secure sensitive business data.
- Never leave documents out in the open. If a document needs a physical copy, keep it locked in a file cabinet and these documents should be accessed only by the designated employees.
- Scan and convert important documents into electronic format and save files to a drive or secure cloud storage server. It is necessary to make data backup part of your routine business operations.
- Use strong passwords to protect systems that hold confidential documents.
- Make sure to back up your business data into a secure database.
- Encrypt your digital data in transit and at rest.
- Make a written document retention policy to identify what information must be kept, how it is secured, how long it is kept and how to dispose of it securely.
- Make shredders available throughout the office and next to the printers or copiers in order to dispose outdated documents correctly and also keep those documents in a secure location until you shred them.
- Never keep sensitive information longer than necessary. Keep them if there is a legitimate need and also add security measures, if needed.
- Remove all digital photos and other media that have no value including blurry shots, corrupted files etc. Throw away DVDs and other CDs that don’t work.
- Add labels to digital files to make them easily searchable. Index the files into a centralized electronic repository.
Outdated documents should be securely disposed. This is vital to your information cleaning efforts. The following are a few tips that help dispose the outdated documents.
- Shred all outdated documents that contain sensitive content.
- Hard drives must be suitably destroyed before disposal.
- Avoid a hefty fine by following secure data disposal procedures that meet or exceed those requirements.
Similarly, old or useless data should be deleted from a database. Outsourced solutions from a reliable data cleansing company help remove corrupt or inaccurate records from a database.
