With the spring weather some of you may be thinking it’s time to start the spring cleaning process. Some of you will go through your homes with a vengeance getting rid of unnecessary things. Some may start to think about getting the salt off your cars from this grueling winter. Others may think about physically picking up around their office, maybe even redecorate a little. Get a fresh spring perspective.
I’ll bet less of you think about your digital cleanup. Out of sight, out of mind. Well, it pays to clean up your digital foot print too. Never mind the carbon credits you can earn, because as you know, everything contains energy. That thumb drive or portable storage e-book, do you even know what’s on it? Do you need all of that? Take a few minutes and review what’s on these devices. Maybe encryption wasn’t so easy for you when you placed that tax return on your storage device, or maybe you used an excel spreadsheet to store your passwords instead of today’s modern password management tools. Time for a refresh on your storage devices.
Just like how you utilize Identity Finder at work, you can use it at home on your personal devices. Your local ISO can give you a license to obtain a fully functional copy of Identity Finder. You can install it on your home computers to clean PII you don’t need there anymore or alternatively you can encrypt it. Scan your thumb drives and external storage devices at home, the data for the at home version of Identity Finder is not reported into the college.
Follow the ole mantra. If you don’t need it, shred it. If you do need it you can choose ignore. Then when this process has completed, go back and look at what is on those devices, continue to clean up or delete what you no longer need whether or not it contains sensitive data. The next time you need portable storage space, you should have it available. By going through this spring cleaning process, you will also be reminded of what files are where so, when you need them in the future you should have better recall to find them quickly.
Same holds true for cloud data. What’s in your Dropbox account, your Apple cloud account? I’ll bet there are a few actors and actresses out in Hollywood that wished they had done some spring cleaning prior to the Sony fiasco. The one large difference with cloud data is people usually have to pay for storage in the cloud and why pay for something you no longer need.
The other item of concern with cleaning in the cloud, is that a lot of the cloud based services you use, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, they have the right to terminate their services and if you are not paying attention, you can permanently lose all of that data. Consider what happened to Google Reader recently. Poof! It no longer exists. (http://www.google.com/reader/about/)
Supervisors may want to take a moment to review their off boarding procedures. Can you account for all of your documents and data, should anyone of your employees up and leave? Now would be an excellent time to review your procedures and technologies to prevent business disruptions in your departments.
Some tips to use to get through the daunting task: (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tackle-digital-spring-cleaning-with-carbonite-cloud-backup-203005181.html)
- Take it “byte by byte”.
- Tackle those taxes.
- A picture is worth a thousand words.
- Create a VIP club.
- Protect your files.
Finally, while talking about the cloud and portable storage devices, ensure your backups are reviewed as well. Keep only what you need, minimize data size, and test the restore procedure to ensure it works, no use keeping a bad copy of a backup with a good copy sitting beside it, right?
The key here in anything you do is to reduce the footprint, get organized and group related files into logical folders. (https://www.irontree.co.za/blogpost/blog/tips-for-spring-cleaning-your-cloud-storage-or-cloud-backup )