15 Data Security Tips to Protect Your Small Business
Thanks to SmallBusinessComputing.com and Jennifer Schiff for this article!
In August 2010, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse published its latest Chronology of Data Breaches, which showed that since 2005 more than a half-billion sensitive records have been breached. Of those breached records — which contained such sensitive data as customer credit card or social security numbers — approximately one-fifth came from retailers, merchants and other types of non-financial, non-insurance-related businesses, the majority of which were small to midsized.
An equally scary statistic: approximately 80 percent of small businesses that experience a data breach go bankrupt or suffer severe financial losses within two years of a security breach, according to John Sileo, a professional identity theft consultant and speaker, who knows firsthand about the havoc a security breach can wreak on a small business.