Data is the new currency in the modern world. The importance of safeguarding data has become very clear to both business owners and consumers. Data security is essential for any business to preserve trust in the company.
Companies collect essential data like financial information, personal information, and even government-approved IDs. It is critical to make sure the data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Businesses lost about $40 billion in 2018 following the loss of about a million data records on average. This point proves how important it is to protect data from being lost or hacked.
For making data secure, the best bet for companies is to use modern data security practices. Data security can be defined as the combination of processes and technology to protect data.
What are the main elements of Data Security?
The three greatest elements of data security are also known as the CIA Triad. These points are critical to the success of a business and how it protects its data.
Confidentiality: This element ensures that the data is only accessible by those permitted to reach it.
Integrity: This element relates to the quality of the data, ensuring the data is accurate and needs no changes.
Availability: Data is useless if it is not available on demand. This element makes sure that whenever a business needs data, they get direct access.
Technology-Based Data Security
There are many technologies businesses need to implement to lower their chances of getting hacked.
Access Control
The best method to ensure data protection is by enabling access control. It can be defined as restricting access to both digital and physical data. Only authorized people can have access to the data.
Access control can be achieved by employing authentication work. Some examples of confirmation are passwords, PINs, retinal scans, swipe cards, and others. The users have to tell the system that they can access the data by proving their identity.
The system then checks the proof provided by the user. If the content matches the database, the user is permitted to access the data.
Encryption
The process of converting simple texts or images into complex codes and then decoding them for authorized users is called encryption. Encrypted data can take ages for hackers to decode. The process prevents potential hacking from being a threat.
Data is most vulnerable to be stolen when it is in transit. Due to encryption, the stolen data would be of no use to the hacker. It is necessary to enable the encryption of data for users on websites and apps.
Other similar data security technologies to encryption are data masking and tokenization. In this process, the real data goes somewhere else, while tokens represent the data.
Data Resiliency
Data resiliency is vital to ensure the availability of data 24/7. The process of backing up data and ensuring measures to keep data available for delivery on demand is called data resiliency.
Some steps that can improve data resiliency in your group are:
- Proper power backup in case of emergencies or natural disasters.
- High-speed links to deliver data.
- Maintenance of both hardware and software.
Process-Based Data Security
Many data security measures are process-based, which means just by practicing standard protocols for data management, you can reduce the chances of your data being hacked.
Data Backup
It is standard practice to backup data on the central servers in case of a breach, data loss or corruption, and other issues. It is possible to back up the data on cloud services from groups like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft Azure.
Erasing Data
Data that is outdated for your company might not be outdated for the hackers. They can still use these points to penetrate your systems. To stop that from happening, the best thing to do is to delete all data when no longer needed and then to wipe the old data drive. You can also physically damage the data drive by drilling it to make sure the data cannot be accessed.
Data Auditing
A data breach can be inevitable, as hackers are getting smarter and can find ways to hack any system. To find the weakness in your system, a proper data auditing process will be a necessity. You can employ white hat hackers to check your system.
Data auditing helps your system remain safe and secure. The data auditing process needs routine updates with time, as hackers can use new methods.
Risk Assessment
One of the most important processes to classify the data based on their risk of being hacked is risk assessment. With the help of a risk assessment auditing process, the data that are most prone to being hacked can be identified.
The need for storing the data can then be determined. If it is vital to store the data, it can stay in a more secure location with restricted access.
Data Prioritization
In the past, companies used to store as much data as possible for future use. But, it became clear that storing huge data comes with its risks. It gets easier to hack the system using the data stored by the company.
After finishing the risk assessment of the data on hand, the next step should be to identify which data are not required by the company. The useless data should be removed from the system.
It is also important to remove data no longer required by the company. Even if the risk of storing those data is low, it is practical to clear the content for safety issues.
Conclusion
By proper use of technology and processes, it is possible to keep the data secured. With time new technologies and processes need to be implemented in the system. Proper education regarding safe usage of data is also required, so the employees know their roles in preventing security breaches in the workplace.