We’re now in peak summer holiday season but business still keeps rolling! This month we look at how to better manage data retention and an interesting IoT story that might be a bit close to home.
Smart data retention
Data is the bedrock of today’s digital business world, including information such as employee records, contracts, financial statements, client data and back-ups. It’s all too easy to for it to become overwhelming and disorganised. It’s vital to be able to keep information securely and within the necessary regulatory requirements whilst optimising storage and access to make sure your business can use its valuable data effectively. To do this you need a robust data retention policy:
- Involve the right people: IT, legal, HR and relevant department heads
- Identify compliance rules: make sure all applicable regulations, from local laws to industry-specific guidelines, are documented and built into your process
- Map your data: identify your types of data, where it’s held, who owns it and how it’s used across systems
- Set retention timelines: each data type needs a lifecycle from being kept in storage, archived or deleted
- Determine responsibilities: allocate specific responsibilities for monitoring, auditing and enforcing your policy
- Automate where possible: use software tools to handle archiving, deletion and metadata tagging (also minimising human error)
- Review regularly: set up annual (or bi-annual) reviews to make sure your policy is updated with new laws or business changes
- Train the team: for an effective policy everyone needs to understand how data should be correctly handled and the impact on their day-to-day work
Ring – bug or hack?
The IoT has revolutionised many everyday tasks and the Ring doorbell is just one example – who would have thought 15 years ago you would have been able to answer your door from anywhere in the world? However, as we have often previously discussed, there can be vulnerabilities to hackers from any device connected to the internet. In this Forbes article, the author discusses numerous social media reports of a possible mass hack on 28th May this year resulting in apparently unauthorised device connections. However, Amazon has said this was in fact caused by a backend update. Whatever did happen, it’s perhaps another useful reminder of the need for good cyber hygiene when embracing new technologies.
