Data Privacy Week is here.

Last week, we talked about how to apply Data Privacy on an individual level, for you, your data, household, personal devices, and more. This week, we focus on the organizational level. With guidance from the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) on how to participate in this year’s Data Privacy Week, we compiled the ways you can fortify your organization’s privacy. What steps can you take to protect the privacy of your business?

Conduct An Assessment

How do you assess your data collection practices? Are you keeping your employees’ individual personal information safe? Is the data processed in a fair manner?

Making sure their data is only collected for legitimate reasons is key to keeping your data tight. Additionally, maintaining oversight of your business’ vendors and partners allows you to protect against unauthorized access of your networks.

Adopt a Privacy Framework

Carson & SAINT emphasizes creating a culture of security within your organization. This starts with educating your employees and practicing safer methods. To make it easier, you can follow a privacy framework.

NCA has provided different frameworks you can follow, listed below:

• NIST Privacy Framework
• AICPA Privacy Management Framework
• ISO/IEC 27701 International Standard for Privacy Information Management

Educate Employees

Do you have a privacy policy for your company that your employees can follow? Do they know about it? Not only that, but do employees in leadership positions know their responsibility in your culture of privacy? Involvement from your employees and support will go a long way for practicing privacy.

Make a privacy policy and educate your employees of their role in this policy. Most companies do this during the onboarding of their new employees.

Ask them how data privacy comes into play in their daily workflow. Are they exercising data privacy throughout all parts of their process?

Lastly, make sure employees are updating their privacy and security settings on BOTH work and personal accounts. This is an easy step that positions your accounts to be geared towards privacy.

Want more information about Data Privacy? See NCA’s official resources here.

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