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How To Protect Your Computer Data

As a business owner or manager, you probably are proud of your hard work to streamline your production process, refine your services, create a long-term business plan and establish an excellent employee benefit plan. You may then feel that you have covered all of these bases.

But with all that effort, you may not even have considered the security of your computer data. In fact, the information in your computer databases could well be highly sensitive or valuable to others in your industry. If so, you need to ask questions like these;

• Is your operating systems security rudimentary to nonexistent?
• Could someone who really wanted to access your files?
• How can you ensure that your data are safe from prying eyes or manipulation by unauthorized persons?

Of course, the information in your database is most valuable to you. Even if your data were simply lost or changes without your permission, the cost could be significant.

BASIC PROTECTIVE MEASURES

Taking some fairly simple steps can help you improve the security of your computer system. Two of the simplest procedures are often not enforced; password protection and locks. Change passwords frequently, and keep them at least six characters long. Try not to use passwords that someone else could easily guess, like names or birth dates. Often passwords are case-sensitive, so if you mix upper- and lower-case letters, you may be able to frustrate the attempts of hackers. Remember, though, if you forget your password, you are not likely to be able to recover your data!

If your system is connected to a network, keep the computer server and any related equipment and modems in a room that can be locked. Use a key lock for the network server, and lock all system, network, application software and information backups in a drawer. Regularly scheduled backups are essential to help you reconstruct stolen or damaged data. Backups should be stored in a safe place, preferably not in the same building.

SPREADSHEET PROTECTION

Spreadsheet programs offer may built-in security measures. If you use only spreadsheets, become familiar with the masking keystrokes that can be used to hide rows, columns, cells or even the entire spreadsheet. Both Lotus and Excel, for example, have series of keystrokes that will help you protect your data via the use of passwords.

Many programs also have intruder alarms to let you or your staff know whether someone has invaded the files and changed something. For example, if a section of a spreadsheet is protected with an alarm, it may be in the form of a "hash-control total," which ensures the accuracy of processed data by finding the sum total of all the fields of data. The has total is automatically recalculated at various points and compared with the original total. If data have been lost or have changed, the program reveals the discrepancy.

Automatic date and time stamping can also be useful to help you detect unauthorized updates and determine whether someone has tampered with data.

WORD PROCESSING PROTECTION

You and your staff can also use masking and change detection techniques to protect word-processing data. In addition, you can make any file a read-only file. Masking a document is fairly easy in most word-processing programs. Often you can simply highlight the text and use a clear white font or an unreadable font. Some programs allow you to print out a summary of words, bytes, lines, characters and paragraphs and compare it with previous printouts to determine whether the numbers have changed. If a word-processing document is linked to a spreadsheet or database, make sure that the links are protected as well, so that your data cannot be accessed through them.

INTERNET PROTECTION

You can prevent computer information from being pirated on the Internet by making all networked disks read-only. If you need more security than this, you may want to use firewall. A firewall computer is a separate guard computer that translates all communication between the Internet and your local network, monitors requests and allows access only to designated users.

MAKE COMPUTER SECURITY A PRIORITY

All businesses depend to a large extent on the integrity of their computer data. Taking these simple steps to ensure that integrity is protected is certainly worth the time and effort. Don't neglect computer security. And, to ensure that you're taking all possible precautions to protect your business, fill out the Employee Fraud Prevention Quiz. It will help increase your awareness of internal fraud and its causes and show you ways to prevent it you may not have considered.