This is a guest post by Robert Dean, who has worked in the document shredding industry for several years and believes in the importance of data security. He currently works for The Shredding Alliance.

In the computer age, technology has quickly come to dominate many aspects of daily life. As industries have begun to store everything from photographs to bank account information on computers, data security has become a very important concern. Small business owners may find themselves overwhelmed with all of the various options for security, as they lack the resources of large corporations. Here are some ideas to help keep confidential information safe from intruders.

All computers within a small business should be password protected, and the passwords should not be easily guessed. Unfortunately, this level of security is very basic and much more advanced means are necessary for very sensitive information.

Computers should also be equipped with backups to ensure that any information ever lost, for example if the hard - drive crashes, can be restored. They can be created on a variety of mediums, such as rewritable CDs or DVDs, external hard – drives, magnetic tape, or specially designed remote backup services.

Before any computer is thrown away, donated, or retired in any other way, a small business owner also needs to be sure to completely erase the hard – drive. Simply deleting program icons is not sufficient. True, complete data erasing often requires special software.

For those who work in certain industries, there may be information that those high in the company can see, but those lower in ranking should not have access to. In a bank, this may be certain identity numbers that are kept highly classified. In other industries software developers, contractors, vendors, and others should not be given unrestricted access. In these instances, data masking can be used to preserve privacy. Data masking will hide certain parts of the data, such as the first digits of social security numbers, credit card numbers, or account numbers. Those who have not been authorized may only see the last couple of digits.

File and data encryption are means of hiding what the content truly is unless a person has the special password or key. Encryptions are designed to prevent outside parties from being able to access or intercept information. There are varying degrees of encryption security available. For example, software based encryption can encrypt files and data to prevent people from stealing it. It can be wonderful to use on devices such as laptop computers, in case the machine were to get lost or stolen. Unfortunately, malware programs and hacks are capable of corrupting the encrypted data so that the original owners cannot access the information either. For information that needs a more secure protection, a hardware – based encryption system can prevent unauthorized people from being able to read or write on the data. The stronger protection helps to keep hackers further away.

Keeping data protected in a genuine concern of small businesses. Data breaches and identity theft cost many people enormous amounts of time and money in reclaiming personal information and rectifying what was done with the sensitive information. Those who run businesses should take security very seriously, and implement these strategies to prevent the worst from happening to them.