One of the ways information breaches can happen to a business is through the theft of paper documents from your office, or right out of the trash. It’s not always some highly planned scheme that looks like something from Oceans 11, it can often just be a crime of opportunity. The situation is an easy one to imagine: someone comes into the office, they see some papers that look official on a nearby desk, with a quick look around they see no one is watching them. A decision is made, the papers are grabbed up, pocketed before anyone notices, and just like that you’ve experienced a data breach.

How do we stop this? It’s clearly an unacceptable situation for you to be in, it poses a big security risk for you and your clients. Fortunately there is an easy solution you can follow to help prevent the theft of documents left laying about. If you read the title of this blog then you already know what you have to do: implement a clean desk policy in your workplace.

Creating A Clean Desk Policy

Creating a policy is fairly straightforward, as it is a simple thing to understand. Proper training and enforcement will be required to ensure the success of this policy.

It is important for your staff to understand that they can’t be leaving sensitive papers on their desks. As the example above illustrates, it is an easy thing for a dis-honest individual to happen by and take something. Naturally the next place people will keep files would be in their desks, which can work if you can secure the drawers. Depending on what exactly your document management policy is, you may decide a better option is storing them in an agreed upon location. The practicality of that will of course depend on the nature of your business.

Not only will using a clean desk policy improve the security of your information, it’ll also tidy the place up! It could breathe a breath of fresh air into an otherwise cluttered office. As helpful as this can be, it isn’t a substitute for proper document shredding. When you are ready to get on board with some, let us know ASAP.

We’ll be there.