We are well into that time of year when people are spring cleaning and long time readers of our blog will know that we are big fans. They will also know that we think that spring cleaning is a bit of a misnomer and really that cleaning can happen at any time of the year (including Autumn, which is a surprisingly good time to do it).
All businesses should have a data retention policy, and it’s likely that you reviewed and updated yours in line with GDPR coming into force a couple of years ago.
As good data management is important for all businesses, but is one of the tasks that regularly end up falling down the priority list, it is well worth carving out some time to update and improve what you’re doing now. There are three broad steps you will want to follow.
Is your data policy fit for purpose?
The first question to ask yourself is whether your data policy is fit for purpose or not? This is an important first step as data regulations can change, and you may also have different regulations that you need to conform to depending on where your customers are in the world.
Whilst there haven’t been changes as broadly sweeping in the UK as when GDPR was introduced, it is well worth taking a look at the resources availble on the
Information Commissioners Office website and ensure that everything is in order.
Review your processes involving data
Once you’ve updated (if required) your data policy, the second step is to track this against the current processes that you follow for handling data.
It’s all well and good to have an up to date policy on how the data you hold will be dealt with, but if what you actually do with that information isn’t in line with what you said then it can be a problem.
Review the data that you hold – and clean out the stuff that you shouldn’t.
Once you have taken the first two steps here – firstly making sure that your data policy is up to scratch, and secondly updating the processes for holding the data, its time to strip out what you don’t need and shouldn’t have. Any business will hold a lot of data, not only data about the specific business but also data that has been shared by customers – which it is arguably even more important to protect and ensure is being used correctly.
Arguably this last step is the simplest but nearly always the most time consuming task because it will often involve manually checking through the files that you hold and thinking about whether the information in them does conform to your data policy. Yes, it is time consuming, but it is worth doing it to ensure that you’re conforming to best practice and any legal requirements.
If this or any other IT challenges have got you in a bind then WebbyTech is here to help. You can find the full range of services we offer
here or
contact us directly for a no obligations conversation.
