3 HR Risks and How to Avoid Them
Proactively protecting yourself from HR risks can give you peace of mind and let you focus on how you use your data, not how you store it. Here are some common HR risks and how to avoid them.
HR professionals may handle everything from recruiting, interviewing, and training to payroll and benefits. That means they are the keepers of a lot of important information. And not only do they have information about their organization, but also personal information about employees too. If the wrong hands get ahold of the right information, it can be a disaster for your company and your employees. According to a survey by the National Cyber Security Alliance, after small or medium-sized businesses experienced a data breach, 37 percent suffered a financial loss, 25 percent filed for bankruptcy, and 10 percent went out of business.
Proactively protecting yourself from HR risks can give you peace of mind and let you focus on how you use your data, not how you store it. Here are some common HR risks and how to avoid them.
Risk #1: Keeping Your Data in Spreadsheets
While using spreadsheets to keep track of data may seem like a convenient and cheap solution, spreadsheets are not an incredibly secure way to store data and can leave you vulnerable to a security breach or hackers. And if your data is stored across multiple spreadsheets, it can be easy to lose track of the information you need to access.
Solution: Store your HR data in an HRIS. With a single, secure database you can store your confidential data safely. An HR software solution like BambooHR can protect your data with web application firewalls, frequent vulnerability scans, continuous security management and monitoring, and more.
Risk #2: Forgetting Security Issues When Offboarding Employees
Onboarding employees is the fun part: introducing them to new coworkers, sharing your organization’s incredible culture with them, and getting them set up to start doing great work. But employees have to be offboarded too. And when they leave, their access to all types of secure information, passwords, and applications needs to be removed. In an Intermedia Risk Report, 13 percent of people reported that they have accessed systems belonging to their previous employers after they left the job.
Solution: Automated account licensing and management. With an automated account manager, you can instantly revoke access on the day an employee leaves using a single app directory. Instead of having to individually track down which applications they had access to and nudging IT to revoke access, HR can manage accounts on their own in one convenient place.
Risk #3: Having Weak, Insecure Passwords
We all know that coworker who keeps their passwords on a Post-it-Note on their desk, visible to anyone who walks by. Or how about the team member whose passwords are all the same easy-to-remember pet’s name? Not surprisingly, these aren’t the safest ways to store or set your passwords, and once again leave your sensitive HR data at risk. But once you convince everyone on your team to use secure passwords stored in a secure place, your troubles aren’t necessarily over. There’s a good chance it will just mean more work for IT, constantly recovering passwords (which is still better than having your data stolen!).
Solution: Single sign-on. With single sign-on, your HR team has one-click access to all their apps and improves security by only having to memorize one very secure password. (You can remember just one, right?)
An HRIS like BambooHR and secure access software like Idaptive can be the difference between keeping your employee and company information safe and confidential and having a costly data breach. Don’t let your HR risks be the reason your employee’s identity gets stolen!
