It’s more important than ever to keep your employee and company data as secure as possible. As cyber attacks get more sophisticated and people have more access to technology that requires stringent security, ensuring your payroll is secure is paramount for any operating business.

Every single person in your business deserves to have their personal data secure and even if bad actors can access just one piece of data, they have the potential to defraud employees and affect your business.

Payroll systems are an entry point for suspicious activity and your business’ financial information and employee’s data are more at risk without correct security protocol.

Here at APS Global, we build long-lasting professional partnerships with our clients and security is at the heart of everything that we do.

If you’re not enlisting the advice of a payroll service, here are some security aspects that you must ensure you’re following:

Building a Culture where Security is Important

One of the best practices you can encourage within your business, is a security aware culture. Investing in training and resources for your employees means that you’re making a commitment to educate everyone about the risks cyber security can pose from a payroll perspective.

This can cover precautions as simple as being more critical of emails received that are asking for personal information – for example, many scams surrounding fake HR personnel asking for employee’s personal data are increasingly common.

Getting employees to be more naturally suspicious of work email requests and making security a priority can help to build a more robust system.

Education and Transparency

Your employees should be aware of GDPR protocol, but not everyone in your business may be aware of security processes and data sharing policy that should be in place. Understanding these policies is key when building a security culture.

This is why sharing knowledge is a habit your business should get into. A BAE Systems survey showed that 40% of senior management staff lacked understanding about their own company’s cybersecurity policies. Doing regular refresher training about policy and procedure may fall down your priority list if you’re busy doing lots of other tasks, but if your business is serious about protecting itself and employees, then it’s something that should be built into your business practices.

Updating Tech and Tools

If you’re not using a payroll system then your business can be at risk, because you might not have the latest software updates which can create vulnerabilities in your system and payroll that cyber criminals can take advantage of.

It’s also good practice to get used to updating and changing passwords that are used to access payroll information and any other sensitive data/info. Making passwords robust is vital too and if you prompt employees to regularly change their passwords, they’ll get used to using more diverse and stronger passwords.

When sending data over email, encrypting email data attachments is important too. Email can be seen as too vulnerable to send data, so keeping payroll data inside dedicated software and file sharing can be a safer way to share data.

We use sophisticated security measures to keep your payroll data safe – for more advice and info, contact us today.