What is Your Data Breach Response Plan?

Despite your best cybersecurity efforts and thoughtfully crafted data handling policies, data breaches can still occur. In fact, hackers often go after smaller businesses for the simple reason that they aren’t as capable of investing a significant amount of resources into cybersecurity as bigger companies are. Because a data breach can be a serious problem, it’s wise to have a data breach response plan in place.

What Your Data Breach Response Plan Should Include

Having a data breach response plan can help to limit the amount of damage that can occur as a result of a data breach, thereby preserving your reputation and helping protect employees, customers, and business partners from further exposure. The following are a few things that should be included in your data breach response plan:

• Determine responsibilities – If a data breach occurs, your response team should know what to do. Make sure everyone on the team knows what their individual responsibilities are so that there’s no confusion and work can begin immediately after discovery.
• Create a communication plan – Clear and quick communication is critical. When a data breach occurs, who needs to be contacted? Make sure your team knows who they need to reach out to and how. You should also create a communications strategy that outlines how you will inform those affected (employees, customers, and vendors) and how you will notify state and federal agencies, and the public, if required.
• Have a legal support team in place – Speak to your attorney about the legalities of a data breach and what you can do to limit the damages of a breach.
• Purchase data breach insurance – Because you may be held liable for any sensitive data that’s stolen, you should protect yourself financially by purchasing data breach insurance.

It’s important that you review your plan regularly to ensure that everyone remembers what they should do in the event of a data breach. Additionally, you may hire new personnel who need to be informed about your data breach response plan as well.

CSR Readiness Plan

Here at AccuShred, we offer a full-fledged CSR Readiness Pro set of tools to help protect your business in the event of a data breach. Our CSR Readiness Pro Program gives you the expertise and structure to assess your policies for handling sensitive data. As part of the toolkit, our CSR Breach Reporting Service will work with you to evaluate any data breach incidents that occur and determine whether consumers or authorities need to be notified. CSR will then file all required state and federal notifications on your behalf as well as help prepare notifications concerning the data breach to your customers, if required by law. By using our CSR Readiness Pro Suite, you can help limit the PR damage that a data breach can cause. Properly handling a data breach is essential to maintaining a valuable client base, but it’s a very costly and time-consuming process, especially if you do business in multiple states. Let our CSR Readiness Pro Suite of data breach tools help mitigate that burden.

There are many security measures that you can take to lessen the chances of a data breach. No matter how proactive you are, data breaches can still occur. How you prepare for and handle a data breach can have a big impact on how much it will end up costing you, both in fines and lost customers, which is why you should consider implementing the CSR Readiness Pro Suite of data breach tools for your business now. For more information contact us at AccuShred today.