In today’s digital age, data breaches are becoming more and more common. In the first quarter of 2020 alone, there were more than 2,900 confirmed breaches. If your legal team is not taking the necessary precautions to protect your data, you could risk your whole company.
Legal teams handle sensitive information on a daily basis. If this information falls into the wrong hands, it could have devastating consequences for your company and your clients. You could face hefty fines, damage to your reputation, and even jail time.
To help you protect your data, here’s a list of mistakes that could put your legal team at risk of a data breach.
Storing Data in Unsecure Locations
Where you store your data also plays a role in data security. Suppose you are storing data in unsecured locations, such as on an unencrypted USB drive or in the cloud, without proper security measures in place. In that case, you are already putting your data at risk.
When storing data, you should always use a secure location. This could be an encrypted hard drive or a password-protected cloud storage service. By keeping your data in a safe place, you can help to ensure that only authorized individuals will be able to access it.
Don’t forget tot consider who has access to your data storage locations. If possible, only give authorized individuals, such as members of your legal team, access to these locations. This will help to protect your data further.
Failing to Back Up Data Regularly
Your legal team likely relies on various electronic files, such as documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But if you are not backing up your data regularly, you could lose all of this information if your system crashes or becomes corrupted.
To protect your data, you should create backups regularly. This could be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how often your team adds or modifies files. Store these backups in a secure location, such as an encrypted hard drive or password-protected cloud storage service. Keeping a copy of your data in another location protects against losing pertinent files if something happens to primary storage.
Not Encrypting Sensitive Data
Each day, your business deals with various business data, including client data, financial information, employee records, and more. If your legal team is not encrypting sensitive data, anyone who gains access to your systems could potentially view this information. This includes hackers, cybercriminals, and even disgruntled employees.
Data encryption is one of the best ways to protect your data. Data transforms into a code only someone with the right key can decode when encrypted. This makes it much more difficult for unauthorized individuals to access your data.
To protect your data, you should encrypt all sensitive information both in transit and at rest. This will make it much more difficult for hackers to access your data if they can gain access to your systems.
Not Having a Data Breach Response Plan
A disaster recovery plan is essential for any business, but it is crucial for legal teams who deal with sensitive data. If your legal team does not have a disaster recovery plan in place, you can end up losing data if your systems go down.
Your data breach response plan should outline the steps you need to take to recover from a data loss. This could include creating backups, choosing secure locations to store data, and encrypting sensitive information. By having a plan in place, you can help ensure that you can quickly and efficiently recover from a data loss.
Failing to Train Employees on Data Security
Your employees are one of the most critical lines of defense when it comes to data security. If your employees don’t have proper training on data security or don’t know the importance of this, they could inadvertently put your data at risk.
Make sure to provide your employees with adequate training on data security measures. This training should cover topics such as spotting a phishing email, what to do if they think their computer has been hacked, and the importance of encrypting sensitive data. By providing this training, you can help ensure that your employees know the risks and how to protect your data.
Failure To Automate End-to-End Privacy Rights Fulfillment
As the volume of privacy rights requests grows, so too does the likelihood of human error in trying to manage them all. To protect customer data and stay compliant, legal teams need to automate the end-to-end privacy rights fulfillment process as much as possible. By automating this process, you can help ensure that you fulfill all privacy rights requests in a timely and accurate manner. This will this help to protect your data and ensure that you can comply with all applicable laws and regulations.
You can do this by investing in a reliable-open source language privacy tool purpose-built for privacy rights fulfillment. This tool should be able to help you automate the process of collecting, managing, and fulfilling all privacy rights requests.
Additionally, the tool should also be able to provide you with real-time visibility into the status of all privacy rights requests. This will help you ensure that you can quickly and efficiently fulfill all requests in a timely manner.
Make sure to do your research before investing in an open-source language. Find a reputable provider with an excellent track record showing how reliable their offers are. It would be best if you could find one that caters explicitly to legal teams to ensure that their tool can meet all of your needs.
Data security is essential for any legal team. Taking the proper precautions can help ensure that your data stays protected from potential threats. Make sure to create backups, train your employees on data security, and automate the process of fulfilling privacy rights requests. By taking these steps, you can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your data and business are safe from the prying eyes of criminals.
