11 years ago, The Council of Europe Data Protection declared Monday 28th January Data Privacy Day. With the purpose of raising awareness and promoting privacy and data protection best practices.
As a self-employed professional, you’re likely used to setting your own schedule and regularly working on new projects with different clients. With all this on your plate, it can be easy to overlook any cybersecurity threats you may encounter.
Even without enterprise-level security and backup measures in place, there are still things you can do as a freelancer to keep your and your client’s data secure. Here are three of the best practices.
Public Wi-Fi hotspots can be the biggest source of potential problems for people connecting outside of a secure office network. If you are working in a public space, such as a coffee shop, airport or hotel, you should be sure to tether your smart device to your laptop or use your own mobile modem or hotspot if possible, as these are much more secure than a public network.
Regardless of whether you are using your own private hotspot or a public one, it’s a good idea to keep your internet browsing private by using incognito browsing and avoid entering or accessing your most private or personal data if you can help it.
If you use an office suite such as Microsoft Office to create client documents, you should consider how safely the information has been backed up. If you want to make sure you are securely preserving and managing your work, you should really consider investing in a cloud solution such as Google Drive or Dropbox.
Through an office suite, you could easily lose data through accidental deletion, overwriting a document or forgetting to manually upload files before a security incident arises. With cloud backup, the software is continually and automatically backing up all user files and data and scanning for changes along the way. Cloud backup also helps with versioning, if you overwrite a file by mistake, you can access an older version saving you hours of needing to re-do a piece of work.
We’ve all likely been in the situation where we’ve clicked ignore on a reminder to update a piece of software. When you don’t choose to install the latest version of a program, you leave yourself open to a whole host of threats which have been left behind by the previous version. For anyone working outside of a secure network, it’s important to keep your personal devices, operating systems, applications and other software always updated and patched.
A core part of updating your systems includes making sure you are changing your passwords regularly. You should regularly be creating new, difficult-to-guess passwords for all the programs, software, personal wireless networks and devices that you use regularly.
Don’t forget, GDPR still forms a big part of keeping your data private and secure. Though it may have been 9 months since the legislation came into force, if you’re still not au fait with GDPR as a consultant, you can read our blog to learn more.
