It’s just about time to say farewell to 2015. As 2016 rolls in, it’s important that you take inventory of the small business data that drives your organization.

Over the last few years, it has become incredibly easy to extend data to devices and locations that might not be so easy to find at first glance.  Smartphones, tablets, laptops, USB thumb drives and hard drives, and even home computers can inadvertently be storing critical and/or proprietary data.  Data that YOU need 24/7 access to, but absolutely no one else.

It doesn’t sound that hard, but let’s look at a couple of easy-to-understand examples.  First, you are in a  hurry to make the next train home to go to an important event for your child.  You take a cab to the train station to make it on time. You set your smartphone down to pay the driver.

You don’t realize that you don’t have the phone until your train is already pulling out of the station and the cab has a new fare who is now in possession of your phone.  The first thing that crosses your mind is the set of photos that you took just yesterday.  Are they alrea

dy backed up to the cloud?  What about all of my phone numbers? Those are probably on the company server automatically.

The real question has a lot less to do with what you’re missing, but rather what you just gave away.  Did you have a ‘real’ passcode on the phone?  This is that one time when the ever-convenient ‘1111’ really appears to be worse than a poor choice – it could be a company/project/raise/or even career killer.  How? What if a work colleague carelessly emailed you a spreadsheet full of Social Security numbers of clients or patients.  A breach has occurred without sophisticated hackers involved.  The data was just handed over.

To protect your data, you need to understand where it is and how it could be exposed.  Take the first step to protecting your data is to call your Responsive small business data protection specialist to figure out where it is.