How to Keep Your Belongings Safe in a Shared Space

Keep your room door locked

Agree with your roommates to always keep the dorm room door and windows locked. It only takes a few seconds for a thief to take thousands of dollars of expensive items like your laptop, iPad, jewelry, and even expensive school books.

Don’t leave valuables out in plain sight

Thieves are opportunists and are looking for items to steal. Hide your cash, purse or wallet, jewelry, laptop, and any other important items when not in use. “I trust my roomie but when she has people over, I put my stuff away. Leaving my wallet and electronics laying around is too much temptation,” says USC student Paige Abbassi.

Keep an inventory of all your valuables

Keep photos and serial numbers of your valuables. In the unfortunate case that you or your roommates become victims of a dorm theft, being able to provide campus police with a list of stolen items and their descriptions may increase the odds that they will be recovered.

Get insurance

Should a loss occur, having insurance can help you quickly replace stolen items without a huge cost to you. Your parents’ homeowners insurance policy may cover your dorm room valuables at no extra cost. College Student Insurance provides dorm room policies to cover your valuables.

Coworking spaces are known for being cool, trendy, and flexible places to work. Whether it be freelancers, startup companies, large businesses, part-time hobbyists, or remote workers, coworking offices attract a wide range of people coming from a variety of backgrounds. As such, they need to accommodate each type of worker accordingly, ensuring that the space is not only a nice environment to work in, but is also suitably protected.

Businesses need to protect their company data and trade secrets, after all, so keeping their working environment secure is vital. From cybersecurity threats to physical thieves, there are a number of ways in which coworking spaces can be breached. Make sure yours isn’t by implementing these three methods.

Protect your network

Despite the fact that coworkers can work across a plethora of industries, it only takes one bad member to compromise the data of hundreds of others. Therefore, establishing a strong and secure network is key to preventing this – keeping all your coworker’s digital information safely protected.

Hackers tend to target Wi-Fi networks so, rather than hosting all your co-workers on the same network, allocate each of the credentials and a unique password. Alternatively, take it one step further and set up individualized networks for each of your members. This ensures that even if one network gets hacked, the others won’t be affected.

Also, think about investing in an electric timer to shut off Wi-Fi access overnight when nobody is there to keep an eye out on it.

Lock your doors

A pretty obvious one, but having effective physical security measures is just as important as having online protection. For example, having high-quality locks on your doors, windows, and storage cabinets can go a long way in keeping your coworking space secure.

Likewise, access to the building should only be given to members who actually work there. Whether this access solution is smartphone-based or utilized using access codes/smart cards, granting individual admission to users is probably the most foolproof way of ensuring important data stays safe.

Plus, thanks to cloud-based access control systems, you can now control who has access to certain rooms and areas in your coworking space. You’ll also be able to keep a log of who logged in, meaning you can stay on top of the inner goings-on in your office.

Watch out for theft/damage

Another fairly obvious security system to have in place is CCTV. Even in the most loving communities, belongings can get lost or stolen so, with a surveillance camera in place, it’ll make it that much easier to rectify issues. Not only that, but it takes the pressure off you need to physically be there all the time – smart surveillance systems allow you to monitor office activities via Wi-Fi when you are away.

You should also install an effective fire alarm system and have it checked regularly. The last thing your coworkers need is for their data to be unintentionally destroyed through insufficient fire safety at your office.