With most businesses going digital, more personal information is left vulnerable than ever before. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, was put in place to ensure private data stays private. The law covers national data across the EU and countries that sell to or interact online with EU citizens. That means that while the GDPR is an EU regulation, Canadians are still affected.

What is GDPR?

Back in 2016, the European Union passed a bill to introduce the Global Data Protection Regulation. The purpose of the legislation was to define the legal rights of EU citizens in relation to their data and to enforce regulations on the data controllers and processors who hold that data. The GDPR will be introduced on the 25th May 2018, and will put impose sanctions on businesses that don’t safeguard the data they process. 

There are countless data thieves who want to steal your company's data so that they can commit fraud or take your assets. You will always be a target, so you must be proactive about protecting your data. To prevent data theft at your business, you need to invest in information security resources and establish an effective information security policy.

Digital technology has dramatically altered how we manage our data. Instead of dealing with more paperwork than a single person is strong enough to carry, we are able to store millions of documents on a device smaller than a human hand. Instead of shipping copies of paperwork via mail or courier, we can deliver a communication in seconds via a slew of online file sharing options. From sharing documents faster to storing them more effectively, digital technology has provided us with many data management upgrades.

Your employees are putting your company's data at risk right now. In most cases, they do this without even knowing that they are. Here are five ways that your employees are putting your confidential information at risk:

Is your business prepared for a natural disaster? Preparing for these unpreventable circumstances will require more than an insurance policy. This is because no amount of insurance can recover your company's data once it is destroyed. Protecting company data from natural disasters requires a specific plan. Here are the steps that you need to take:

One of the most recent developments when it comes to improving your organization's operational efficiency is to go digital. By taking this step, you have given each member of your team the capability to handle tasks much more quickly and with fewer errors. Going digital has allowed you to mostly ignore your paper documents – which is a good thing, since paper documents are expensive and difficult to manage. However, even if you rarely – or never – use them, protecting paper documents still needs to be a priority for your organization. Here is why:

No matter what risks threaten your company's data, total document security is possible. As you know, document security is not something that just happens, so you need to actively take steps to protect your company's information – simply putting everything under lock and key is not enough. That being said, here is what you need to do: