How to Protect Your Copier’s Sensitive Data

You run an accounting firm, and you’ve been handling many tax returns over the past few months. At that time, someone breaks into your building and steals a lot of your equipment. Some of your computers and your copier are missing.

Thankfully, your networking company convinced you of the need to back up and encrypt your customers’ critical data, so that data should be safe.

However, there is one item you forgot to secure: your copier’s hard drive.

Why Does Security on Your Copier’s Hard Drive Matter?

If your copier has a hard drive installed on it, the images you copied and printed from it may be sitting on that hard drive. If you copied any sensitive customer information using that copier, and that hard drive gets stolen like in the example above, anyone who has some technical competence can access it and use it in any way they’d like.

The last thing in the world you want to do is call your customers to tell them their sensitive data just got stolen from your hardware.

However, there is one way to prevent this nightmare scenario from happening to you.

How to Protect the Data on Your Copier’s Hard Drive

There are two easy ways to protect your copier’s hard drive data from theft:

Purchase a data security kit.

If you have a hard drive on your copier, purchase a data security kit for it. This kit will cost you around $300 – $400, and it would wipe the data after every copy. If you run critical data through your copier, double-check if your copier has a hard drive; if it does, jump on that data security kit immediately.

Get a copier with no hard drive.

Another way to protect the data on your copier’s hard drive is to purchase a copier that doesn’t have a hard drive in the first place. If you’re not going to copy anything from that hard drive, then having one installed in your copier is nothing more than a liability.

Follow whichever of these steps applies to you to ensure you keep your customers’ sensitive information secure. Ignorance is no defense; ask your copier rep if the copier you’re looking to purchase has a hard drive installed. If it does, and you still want to buy it, get the data security kit. In case of a break-in, one extra purchase will keep your customers’ data and reputation safe from harm.

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