Do I Need Privacy & Security Documentation?

Documenting important processes for your business and employees is critical to the overall success of the business. This is no different than privacy and security documentation for your business. Having the proper documentation for your business will help with client/vendor questionnaires, insurance for your business, and knowing how secure data is.

There are multiple pieces of data privacy and security documentation that your business needs. Documentation does differ from industry to industry, but many of the critical documents are universal across the board. I’ve outlined some of these critical documents below:

IT Security Policy

Document that lays out the internal security policies of how the business uses, stores, and processes data. May include other policies such as Clean Desk, Remote Working, Responsible Parties, etc.

Disaster Recovery Plan

Set of policies and procedures on how to enable the recovery of vital infrastructure and systems following a disaster. The important portion of this document should outline critical processes and how long each process can be down in order for your business to recover.

Business Continuity Plan

Documented plan and process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations during the execution of disaster recovery.

Data Classification Policy

Policy document to classify different types of data into separate categories in order to understand “sensitivity”. These classifications could include levels such as Public, Sensitive, Private, Top Secret, etc.

Incident Response Plan

A planned set of instructions to help IT detect, respond to, and recover from data privacy or security incidents. These types of plans address issues like cybercrime, data loss, and service outages.

Risk Management Policy

Policy document that aims to provide guidance regarding the management of risk to support the achievement of corporate objectives.

Keeping your documentation current is essential so that critical pieces of the business are known to all. The worst thing that can happen is an employee walks out the door and nothing is documented. Consider this a major issue to the data privacy and security documentation.

If you feel you don’t have the proper documentation or where to start, contact CyberData Pros and we can help. It is not only important to have the proper documentation for the business, but to also keep it updated. Let us help put together a plan and carry out it out to keep your business in full compliance.

It happens all the time. A client or vendor sends over a security questionnaire and you don’t know where to start. How do you fill this out? What if I make a mistake? What if I can’t answer their questions? These are just a few questions that may come to mind. In today’s world of strict compliance, these security questionnaires are becoming the norm. Being prepared and having answers is critical to ongoing business. Let’s break these down and how to approach them.

A typical security questionnaire is going to cover areas of your business that range from documentation of disaster recovery to physical security mechanisms in your business. On average, these questionnaires can be “hundreds” of questions long! Yes, you read that right and many of these require answers within a few weeks.

Start with the privacy and security documentation that you have written and know that you may need to provide some of this. We recently wrote a blog about the kinds of documentation to have and why is it important. Creating a document and data bank of answers will help you get through these questionnaires faster in the long run.

Understand the “technical” data privacy and security areas of your organization. You may have a department at your company that can help fill out the technical questions. This is great, but make sure you understand the answers in case there is any need for justification.

If this all sounds daunting and you don’t have time for it, let CyberData Pros assist you with these questionnaires. We have over 20 years of filling these out for our clients and we will help you better understand the details. Contact CyberData Pros now to see how we can help your business with this and many other data privacy and security solutions.