Secure Your Traveling Work Documents
If you are traveling back and forth to work with client files in your car, you might want to start taking precautions, especially if those client files contain sensitive information.
Imagine this scenario…
You’re just leaving the office after a long day.
But like any good hard working employee or business owner, there’s always more work to be done and hard deadlines that need to be met.
So you pack up a few client files and load them into the back seat of your car so you can do a little work at home.
On the way home, you remember that you have to stop by the grocery store to get some milk and cereal so the kids can eat breakfast in the morning.
By the time you eventually get home, and get the groceries into the house, you’re just too tired to consider any more work for the evening and decide that you’ll wake up extra early in the morning to get a few things done before leaving for work.
Now, imagine if at some point in the above sequence your car is stolen or broken into and your briefcase is stolen. If this were to ever happen, you’re going to have to come to grips with some potentially painful consequences.
You are going to have to notify your clients that their documents were stolen and that there is a potential for identity theft. This could not only be crushing for your customers, but also for you professionally.
Here are some tips you can take in order to protect work documents that are routinely transferred to and from your secure office location:
- You will want to have an accurate accounting of what documents were stolen. Only keep a minimal amount of client information when transporting documents back-and-forth between your office and home. If multiple employees are routinely taking home client information, you may want to implement a client information checkout procedure at the office. It’s much better to know which clients were affected than having to notify each and every one of your clients of a data breech.
- Don’t assume your vehicle is safe. Keep in mind that you have customers’ information sitting in the car if you decide to make pit-stops on the way to or from the office. When you get home, be sure that you also bring in the documents where there’s a more reasonable expectation that they are safe.
- Don’t leave documents lying around at home, in the office, or in the car if at all possible. This information should be protected just as you protect the information in your computer with passwords and behind firewalls. Keep physical document with sensitive information in secure filing cabinets or destroy those files on a routine basis if they are no longer needed.
Taking a few extra moments and steps to protect your customers data is not only the right thing to do professionally, but it is also an important policy to implement in order to protect the good name and reputation you’ve taken so long to build.
About the author: Mike Krauss is the CEO and President of Total Secure Shredding, Inc. a local Disabled Veteran owned San Diego Paper Shredding Service.
