Over eleven million documents which go back over forty years form the main part of The Panama Papers fiasco. The law firm Mossack Fonseca are dealing with many unsatisfied clients, not to mention the multitude of awkward questions. If you are in the legal profession, then you’ll know all too well how this has sent shudders throughout the industry, raising again
crucial questions about data security, document storage and more importantly, how to ensure nothing like this can ever happen to your own firm, meaning that your clients ultimately end up paying the price for outdated, or lax security practices within your organisation.
Don’t allow your clients to pay the price for poor data protection
The law firm has publicly stated that they have been the victims of a data breach, and also that they intend to do whatever they can to make sure whoever is responsible is brought to justice. However, this does raise the question, whom does the blame sit with when a data leak like this occurs? Of course, the papers were the property of the firm; they belong to them and as such, whoever has taken these and exposed them is in the wrong.
However, what data security practices were in place? Were they effective, and were they adequate given the highly sensitive nature of the data which was contained within these files?
Whilst we cannot comment individually on the firm’s security practices, we can look at the different ways in which firms can avoid such an embarrassing and costly incident in the future.
Data encryption – Only you have the key to avoid data leaks
There is a host of benefits to consider when looking at data encryption. The most compelling of all being that if this is deployed correctly within a business, it enables a superior level of data privacy, not to mention compliance and also ensures that your data is entirely unreadable, by anyone but you. With many companies now sharing or storing data in the cloud, encryption is fast becoming a necessity for companies who handle information belonging to, or pertaining to others.
Encryption is a tool which allows you to move securely and store your data in the cloud, and take advantage of this technology, whilst remaining compliant with EU data privacy laws and meeting regulatory requirements. Because you are the only key holder who can unlock the data, whether the data is in the cloud, or on a device, it is secure. It can also give you a competitive edge over any other companies within your industry as well as giving you the confidence that any of your data back-ups are safe and secure.
SMiD offers exclusive control of data that is stored in the cloud, ensuring you that nobody else can see what you are storing, maintaining that your data is kept confidential and secure at all times.
„The impact of data leaks can be canceled out by good #encryption practices“