This informal CPD article Five Steps to Ensure Data Security was provided by The Tesseract Academy, providing executive training in data science, AI and blockchain.
Five Steps to Ensure Data Security
Data protection and privacy are commonly used interchangeably, although they're different. Data privacy determines who has access to data, whereas data protection restricts access. Companies must comply with privacy standards to secure customer data. It affects corporate operations, development, and finances. Companies can avoid data breaches, reputation loss, and regulatory violations by securing data.
The possibility of data breaches should be a wake-up call for all organizations, regardless of where they operate or where their customers reside. Attacks and leaks seldom involve borders, but rather the quantity of data a corporation keeps and processes and its security procedures. In the context of digitalization, insider and external threats, we should take a few fundamental actions to secure data.
1. Data-driven
Traditional security measures include firewalls, antiviruses, and antimalware. Innovative technologies coupled with work habits have expanded the flexibility and vitality of how data is managed and shifted inside and outside a network. BYOD, remote work, and greater dependence on cloud and third-party services mean data is constantly leaving in-house networks and entering insecure situations, often without the company's awareness.
When addressing data protection rules, firms should be data-centric. The attention should move from networks and IT architecture to sensitive data inside them. When a system's size and extensions become fluid, it's simpler to detect and preserve vital data.
2. Confidentiality
First, companies must prioritize the data they acquire and preserve. Personal information applied to identify, link, or discover a single person is deemed sensitive and covered by best data protection legislation. Financial data, HR, accounting, billing, etc. are examples of internal firm information that must be kept secret. Depending on a company's industry, extra sensitive data might be defined: for hospitals and healthcare providers, it can be patient health information, for software businesses, their product code, etc.
3. Data privacy
After identifying sensitive data, company-wide protection rules may be created. Organizations must first establish whether they must fulfill compliance standards and move backwards to include all high-risk data categories. Policies should be developed in conjunction with affected departments to ensure that new protective measures don't hinder their work.
4. Staffing
Employee consideration of new guidelines and conformity demands is another key step. Staff are not always fully informed when it comes to the guidelines they have to follow to ensure client data is protected and the consequences the company could face in not doing so. Employee negligence is a leading cause of data breaches. Hence why training is essential to notify them of their data security obligations, so they handle it carefully.
5. Data-protection software
Specialized Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions may regulate data inside the network and in transit to guarantee data security rules are correctly applied. Endpoint Protector allows enterprises to translate corporate regulations into rules and definitions based on which data may be prohibited from transmission, destroyed or encrypted when located on unauthorized users' PCs or automatically encrypted when transferred onto USB portable devices.
In an era where confidence in businesses will be determined by the amount of data security they can give customers and workers, firms without a strong data protection plan will lose commercial prospects and users and leave themselves exposed to breaches and leaks.
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