Construction Companies Need to Take Data Security Into Account in 2020

In the already chaotic 2020’s scenario for the construction market, data protection is not less of a risk for business continuity. Maintaining the information you have about your clients, projects and the business itself secure is an extra challenge today. Either from an enterprise CIO perspective or an SMB’s owner, keeping your company’s resilience entails taking many aspects into consideration, including the legislation to be compliant with and the real blackhat threats out there.

Information technology security has 3 basic pillars: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This means your data needs to be accessed only by the people who need it to perform their work, known in the IT market as the "principle of least privilege"; it needs to be truly assertive, not damaged or corrupted and available to those people when and where they need it. These 3 pillars keep being needed during a crisis like the COVID-19 one, if not even more.

Commonly one may think that your company is not a target and therefore will not invest in this because other issues are more urgent. The misconception here is that however, your company may not be a target by name, blackhats target companies that are not taking care of their security and will be an easy target because of that. You do not need any scandal now nor clients and governments claiming you broke the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), even less you need someone blackmailing you for a few thousand Euros, Dollars, or Pounds to give you back your project’s information.

More than ever you need your data to keep your business flowing with fewer limitations as possible to overcome the current crisis. You certainly do not consider paying blackmail if it happens as you can not trust a blackhat hacker to keep their word and losing your clients is out of the question. This brings you back to the initial premise that you need to find solutions for your business data.

What Needs to Be Done

We can assume that if you do not feel at direct risk, you would like to find a solution that will demand fewer resource investments from your side, in time, money, and personnel. A good start is to pay closer attention to your processes and the software you use to process and store data. Here are the first questions you need to ask yourself or other departments’ team:

Those questions might not be easily answered even less easily implemented, but surely they are worth your attention and time. If you still do not see the point, find someone who had IT security problems before and hear what they have to say. If they did not go out of the business, they certainly are investing in more security levels then this article just proposed.