The Australian Government is continually responding to changing technologies and their effects on data management. There are also increasing community expectations on organisations to secure customers’ personal data, so it is used only by authorised persons.
Data management happens within an evolving landscape of regulations. Keeping abreast of these can be time consuming and expensive. Not doing so may be even more time consuming and much more expensive.
This is a hot topic, given recent massive data breaches by Facebook and others.
Notifiable Data Breach scheme
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) is a principal body in Australia in this landscape. On 22 February 2018, the OAIC commenced the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme. This places new obligations on organisations in possession of personal information, in the event of a data breach. Requirements for organisations in planning for and responding to a data breach can be found here.
If your organisation suffers a Notifiable Data Breach, you will need to divert significant resources to identify, manage, publicise and rectify the breach. As such, it is likely to be financially costly, as well as damaging your reputation with your customer base.
While it is critical for organisations to have plans in place to properly deal with any Notifiable Data Breaches, it would be much better to plan to avoid them as far as possible in the first place.
A critical aspect of data management is to keep data for as long as required, but then to dispose of it professionally and securely.
Once you have collected your old computers to be destructed, as well as paper or other media on which copies of documents are stored, Confidential Shredding Co provides secure, compliant, efficient and hassle-free destruction of all forms of user information:
• External hard disks or entire old PCs
• CDs, X-rays and other electronic media and other non-paper storage media
• Paper records
We pick up your items slated for destruction, and issue you a Certificate of Destruction upon completion, providing you with auditable evidence of compliance.
Further information
There are federally mandated standards for the proper destruction or de-identification of personal information that may be found here.