DATA SECURITY POLICY TEMPLATE

VERSION HISTORY
VERSION	APPROVED BY	REVISION DATE	DESCRIPTION OF CHANGE	AUTHOR

DATA SECURITY POLICY COMPANY NAME Street Address City, State and Zip webaddress.com Version 0.0.0 00/00/0000

1.	BACKGROUND

This section gives the foundation for your organization's data protection policy, explaining why your organization created it and detailing data security standards and laws that might govern your organization.

It will also provide the objectives your organization intends to achieve by creating and implementing the policy.

2.	SCOPE

This section details everything that your policy covers, including all employees and any others, along with all technologies, data formats, etc. It might make note of financial information and other sensitive or confidential data that your organization may have.

3.	POLICY STATEMENTS

This section is the guts of your data protection policy. Here, you should outline your overall principles of how you plan to protect your data. It might include:

• How employees should use company systems

• Employee responsibility for following your organization's policies and working to protect against unauthorized access to your organization's data

• How you inform people how you might collect information about them and inform them how they can opt out or request changes

• How some of your data might be especially protected, through encryption or other means

4.	ACTIONS / PROCEDURES

This section outlines procedures your organization will implement and actions it will take to protect its data. Details here might include:

• How you train employees on their responsibility in data protection

• Detail on how your networks are configured for security

• How your organization restricts and monitors access to data

• Actions or disciplines that can occur if an employee or other person covered under the policy ignores or violates its requirements

5.	DEFINITIONS

This section provides definitions of information technology and other terms that might be confusing to a lay reader. Those definitions must be written using simple, easy-to-understand language.

TERM	DEFINITION

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