Personally Identifiable Information, otherwise known as PII, is important in any industry, but it’s especially important in the financial sector. We have a few articles that go into detail about what PII is, why we want to safeguard it, and how to best achieve that digitally and physically both in the office and at home.

In PII and Sending Documents Securely, we defined Personally Identifiable Information, or PII. In short, it’s anything that can be used by an organization to identify an individual, like their full name, address, or phone number. There’s also Sensitive Personally Identifiable Information, or SPII, which is any type of PII that requires extra security, like Social Security numbers or certain financial information.

The reason we need to keep PII safe is that if it falls into the wrong hands, the individual who the PII belongs to could have their identity stolen. It doesn’t take a whole lot of PII to open an account in someone else’s name and wreak havoc, so it’s vitally important that we never let that happen.

The full article goes into detail about how you can safeguard PII when working with it digitally through Mimecast’s Large File Send and the Send Message Securely feature, as well as by password protecting PDFs using Adobe Acrobat.

That article was more of a general overview about what PII is and why and how to protect it digitally. In the follow-up article, Keeping PII Safe Offline, we covered safeguarding PII from home in more detail. We discuss when you should and shouldn’t print out PII, and what you can do to keep those printed copies safe. The article also covers basic practices you can engage in regularly to keep PII safe, like closing documents when you’re done with them, making sure papers containing PII are locked away, and locking your screen so no one can gain unauthorized access to your computer.