How to Protect Your Company’s Sensitive Data It is no wonder how data powerfully drives business growth, especially in today’s data-driven digital world. It serves as the nucleus and one of the principal assets of businesses, enabling them to survive and thrive.
Unfortunately, data is highly susceptible to physical threats and cyber-attacks, which can inflict destructive consequences and enormous financial damage on businesses. Per IBM’s 2021 report, data breach costs climbed to $4.24 million and the global average cost for each lost or stolen critical record is $150.
Whether you’re running a big or small business, data security must be one of your foremost priorities. However, it’s crucial to be proactive and agile in protecting your data because breaches can happen lighting fast. In fact, 93 percent of data breaches occur in less than a minute, yet it takes 80 percent of businesses weeks to recognize a breach occurred.
Now, let’s discuss the importance of securing your data and how you can do it.
Data security can make or break your business
Data security is a practice of protecting data or information from corruption or loss. It involves employing protective measures and an integrated security approach to avoid unauthorized access to databases, websites, and computers. Safeguarded data includes personal identity records and sensitive ones such as intellectual properties, research and development assets, and financial data.
Some ramifications of compromised data security include damage to the reputation and credibility of a business. Moreover, revenue loss, having potential liabilities that put a business at risk for expensive lawsuits, loss in productivity, and downtime. This concern may also lead a business to file for bankruptcy.
Data security can make or break your business. Therefore, it’s important to adopt critical measures to safeguard your data.
Noting that some industries, such as fintech, must take extra precautions to keep customers’ funds safe otherwise your business will die.
Safeguarding sensitive data
Learn how you can protect your data through these tips.
1. Keep a data inventory
The first step to keeping your data secure is to know what information you have, how it flows, and who has access to it. This way, your business can better gauge the risks and how you can best put your security measures in place.
Inventory all your physical repositories as well as your digital and storage devices. These may include your computers, laptops, disks, file cases, and flash drives to identify where your company’s sensitive data is stored. It also helps to identify who sends sensitive personal information to your business, what type of information you collect, how your business receives it, where you safe keep it, and who has access to it.
Ensure that you securely keep your client’s sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and financial information as these are often targeted by data thieves.
2. Encrypt your data
Encryption is the process of encoding information to make it inaccessible and intelligible to an unauthorized user. Once data is encrypted effectively, only authorized people who have a “key” can read or utilize it.
By encrypting your data, you get to protect your private and sensitive data. In addition, augment the security of communication between the client and server, and avoid information leaks. However, it’s best if you know what you should encrypt and how to effectively implement it.
3. Safeguard your data with DLP
It’s best to safeguard your information by having multiple layers of protection. Another effective way to protect your sensitive data with DLP or data loss prevention, a cybersecurity solution that’s widely adopted by many businesses at present to protect their data and comply with regulations.
DLP encompasses a wide array of tools and best practices designed to protect companies’ data from corruption, loss, breach, exfiltration, among others through risk detection and prevention. Typically, a DLP software can determine, classify, tag sensitive data, monitor activities, and educate users on regulatory compliance.
Among DLP software’s functions include detection of suspicious emails and blocking of unauthorized actions such as illicit transfer of data. An example is when an employee attempts to forward a confidential email outside the corporate domain without authorization from the company, he or she would be denied permission.
DLP software, usually driven by compliance regulations like the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), also classifies data as confidential and regulated. Then, it specifies policy violations defined by the organization and provides guidance. If it detects a policy violation, it enforces remediation with protective actions.
If you’re a service provider storing customer data in the cloud, here’s a SOC 2 compliance checklist to guide you.
4. Use fine-grained access controls
Fine-grained access control is a method that enables a business to manage access to confidential and sensitive data through a central point. With this type of granular control, a business can specifically control who will have the right to access certain information. This also ensures that each employee can only access the information they need.
Fine-grained access control is highly used in cloud computing where numerous data sources are stored together. It provides each item of data with its own specified policy for access.
5. Create a concrete risk management plan
In data security, prevention is better than cure. As industries continue to innovate, hackers also formulate new ways to intrude into the networks of many businesses. This is why it’s crucial to employ layers of fool-proof protection and prepare for a worst-case scenario with a risk management plan. After all, you can’t always guarantee an impeccable network security structure.
In case of your data gets compromised, you must counteract swiftly to avoid exacerbating the situation. Identify the compromised information, close the devices and programs affected, change all affected passwords, notify the appropriate parties, and conduct a thorough investigation to prevent it from happening again.
Ensuring optimum protection for your data
While eliminating the possibility of data breaches or fraud seems like an impossible task, employing the right data security measures can help your business prepare and combat any data threats.
