The security of the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of your customers and employees should be a top priority for all organizations today. Unfortunately, many organizations are not taking all the necessary steps to protect their PII.

To avoid the loss or theft of PII, your organization needs to be careful in how it sends and stores files that contain sensitive data about customers and employees. If you currently use unencrypted email attachments or FTP to send files containing PII to customers and business partners, you are making a huge mistake. This mistake can lead to fines, lawsuits, and a compromised reputation.

Similarly, if customers and business partners are using email or FTP to send files that contain PII to you, you are allowing yourself to be put at risk with those files as well.

Storing PII files on multiple laptops, desktops, and servers is risky also. Who has access to all those files on all those machines? Do you really know? To counteract this risk, your organization should provide secure, controlled, and auditable access to all files that contain PII. By providing controlled access, you are protecting your organization and you are complying with Federal and/or State information protection regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.

How can your organization protect its PII? Noonmark Technology's Secure File Sharing and Storage System can help you to meet this challenge.

• To determine whether your organization is adequately protecting its PII, please take a look at the questions in the Security Checklist.
• To learn about organizations that did not protect their PII and had data breaches as a result, please see our Data Breaches page.
• To learn about how you can protect your PII, please see our Secure File Sharing and Storage System overview page.