What safeguards should we put in place to secure our data?

In a word where WikiLeaks has been able to break even the defenses of Pentagon, you can never be too careful, especially when working through a service of the type of Web Conferencing that is necessarily exposed to all the gaps and vulnerabilities of the web.

It must be also said that, unfortunately, there is no web Conferencing tool that can be regarded as 100% safe; yet, it is also true that the adoption of some common sense practices can really decrease the risk of data leaks during a web conference at a very low, if not negligible, level.

So, what shall we do in order to have safe web conferences? In order of importance:

1.) Target your sensitive data.

The fewer the sensitive data you share, the better it is for you and your organization. But first, you must know what data are sensitive. Usually, the types of data that are deemed to be handled with special care are:

– Credit card numbers, passwords / credentials to access bank accounts and email accounts;

– Designs and plans of new products; industrial or commercial know-how of any kind;

– Revenues, and other relevant information for the tax man;

– Your customers’ information (like addresses and phone numbers);

– Information on someone’s state of health.

2.) Be aware of the legislation on privacy.

Especially in Europe, there is a huge set of legally binding dispositions on the storage, protection and preservation of sensitive data that impose specific measures on firms and users. Therefore, it is not a bad idea to ask a lawyer for help, as your organization could be required by the law to work out a specific code of conduct to handle with certain categories of data.

3.) Work out a code of conduct and build awareness among your team.

Human mistakes are often the real cause of dramatic data leaks, as it happened in the famous affair Panama leaks. Especially law firms, hospitals and manufactures should create awareness of the importance of keeping some types of data secret among their teams and work out a detailed policy of data security that includes all the practices that everyone has to observe when dealing with a specific category of data, especially while utilizing technologies like web conferencing, emailing and phones.

4.) Keep sensitive data secret as much as possible.

It is not necessary to disclose certain data to every member of your team. The more secret the data are, the more protected they are: organize then your data on a hierarchical structure on concentric circles where only few people can have access to the inner core that holds the most sensitive data.

5.) Technology matters.

The transfer of data through the web must be encrypted in order to avoid middle man attacks. However, this is not sufficient to sleep well at night; it is also important to set properly firewalls, computers and devices, as data can be stolen at either end of the transfer process.

If you are interested in the topic of safe data transmission and web conferencing, you are going to find other useful resources and interesting posts on R-HUB`s blog at http://www.rhubcom.com