Securing Your Recruitment Software Data Neil Thompson, MD, 2LS Limited www.2ls.com

Overview Data is the lifeblood of a recruitment business and for many reasons it pays to keep information in your recruitment database secure, whether it is for business continuity reasons or to prevent data ending up in a competitors hands. Therefore your data needs to be protected from both internal and external breaches. www.2ls.com

What are the threats? It is important to keep in mind that threats to your data can come from a variety of places including all of the following: Environmental – such as fire or water destroying a server Theft – including an employee taking data before moving to a competitor Hacking – an external individual or group of individuals accessing and removing your data Accident – someone unwittingly deleting data. www.2ls.com

What are the risks? Assess the risk to your data and look to see if you have control of that risk and if not who does. For example, the data held in your recruitment database may be on your own servers so you have control of it or it maybe hosted by a third party, in which case the responsibility may fall to the supplier. Established the ownership Decide the level of risk. For example data that is exposed on Internet is likely to be at higher risk to hacking to data that is behind your own firewall. Decide that the risk is so small that it doesn’t warrant taking further action, but what about everything else? www.2ls.com

How do I protect my data? The steps to securing your data broadly fall into the following: Back up regularly – take a copy of the data either as a database backup or if this is not possible export it into a standard format such as comma delimited (csv). Don’t forget your CVs in transportable formats such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Take a copy of the data offsite – there is no point taking a copy of your data and then storing it in the same place as the original. Either buy a cheap external hard drive, copy it onto that and take it home, or have it automatically backed up to an external, cloud based, solution such as CrashPlan. www.2ls.com

How do I protect my data? Do a test restore – there is nothing worse than diligently backing up your data only to find that you cannot, for whatever reason, restore it when it comes to the crunch. Do a test restore before it becomes too late and make sure that your backups are working Restrict who can export – thought needs to be given to exactly who has access to your data internally. Does everyone really need to have the ability to export data to a csv file? Take a look at your system security and ensure that only the lowest permissions are granted to allow someone to do their job. You don’t want your data walking out of the building on a memory stick! www.2ls.com

Conclusion Having a robust data protection and backup policy is essential to ensure that you can continue to run your business should the worst happen. At the same time it is important to keep in mind that your business is likely to be high on the list of targets for hackers but it is important to be prepared for all eventualities. www.2ls.com

More Information 2LS Limited 1 Wesley Gate 70/74 Queens Road Reading RG1 4AP w: www.2ls.com t: 0845 685 2230