Who has access to critical information in your company?
If you can’t answer that question in one sentence, then it’s time to act—without delay. You can only ensure your company’s security once you’ve identified who holds critical information and where it resides. This may sound complicated, but it’s often simpler than you expect. It’s better to act now than to regret valuable information falling into the wrong hands.
Here are 3 essential steps to follow when locating your business's critical information:
1. Map Your Critical Data
The first step is mapping. Begin by reviewing the data handled across different departments in your organization. Identify the employees who manage critical information and determine with whom they share it. Keep the bigger picture in mind—even small or fragmented pieces of data can contribute to larger clusters of sensitive information.
2. Identify Responsibilities and Obligations
Data protection is governed by legislation, contracts, internal policies, and various data protection frameworks. Understanding these enables you to assess risks and clarify your responsibilities—as well as those of your partners and vendors.
With every document or dataset, ask yourself:
“What would happen if this information were shared with external parties?”
Determine the value of that information and the potential impact of a leak. Then proceed to step 3.
3. Define Levels of Security
Once you've identified the type and volume of critical information, you can define the necessary security levels and implementation methods. Using advanced technology, the identification process can be automated based on the criticality of the data.
After this, you can plan your security approach more strategically—aligning processes, reallocating your cybersecurity budget, and reinforcing a company-wide commitment to confidentiality.
So, why act now?
There’s a good chance your company’s critical information is scattered across systems, and you may not even know the full extent of it. Ignoring this reality is no longer an option. Today, AI-powered technologies exist that automate this process efficiently and accurately.
These tools begin by scanning your databases for predefined keywords, then identify and label document types, ultimately classifying your data. With this, artificial intelligence helps you manage access—ensuring that only authorized individuals can view certain categories of information.
This post was brought to you by Kriptos.
