It’s pretty easy to print out a few pages on how employees can keep private data private. It’s not so easy getting your employees to keep those reminders in mind. Here are a few ideas for ensuring compliance in security protocol:
Clearance Levels
There’s no reason for your interns to have the same clearance level as your senior IT people. Having tiered clearance levels ensures that nobody has to be responsible for anything that isn’t directly related to their own work. If an employee doesn’t have access to certain data, then there’s no way for them to put it at risk in the first place. This will also help you to determine who can be trusted with higher clearance levels by seeing how they comply to security protocol at a lower level.
Get It In Writing
Having employees sign an agreement to comply with all security protocol is a good way to sort of set it in stone. A memo is just a memo, we can take or leave it. Signing one’s name to a legal document, on the other hand, can go a long way to imparting the importance of protocol. Even if you never plan to do anything more than give someone a warning for violating the agreement, simply having the agreement in place can go a long way towards compliance.
Put Responsibility On Your Staff
You don’t even need to have any serious discipline measures in place. If an employee is expected to replace it themselves should they lose their phone, then they’re probably not going to lose their phone. In essence, compliance has a lot to do with making sure that security is just as much a concern for your employees as it is for their employer. It’s easier to keep protocol in mind when it’s for one’s own sake, but not so much when you approach a job with a sort of mercenary attitude. Putting some responsibility on your employees is sort of a way to remind them that they are part of the company, so security is just as much their concern as it is yours.
A lot of compliance issues can be solved simply by hiring the right people. You want people who are experienced enough to appreciate the importance of security, and professional enough to follow protocol. As with any area of running a business, hiring the right people will always make your job easier.
