Safeguarding Digital Information
Data Protection
Data protection is one of the key challenges for Organizations
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Data Protection
Data protection is the process of protecting sensitive information from damage, loss, or corruption.
As the amount of data being created and stored has increased at an unprecedented rate, making data protection increasingly important. In addition, business operations increasingly depend on data, and even a short period of downtime or a small amount of data loss can have major consequences on a business.
The implications of a data breach or data loss incident can bring organizations to their knees. Failure to protect data can cause financial losses, loss of reputation and customer trust, and legal liability, considering most organizations today are subject to some data privacy standard or regulation. Data protection is one of the key challenges of digital transformation in organizations of all sizes.
Therefore, most data protection strategies have three key focuses:Data security – protecting data from malicious or accidental damage
- Data availability – Quickly restoring data in the event of damage or loss
- Access control – ensuring that data is accessible to those who actually need it, and not to anyone else
How to Protect Your Organization Data?
Data Protection Strategy
Audit of Sensitive Data
Assessing Internal and External Risks
Defining a Data Protection Policy
Data Security Strategy
Compliance Strategy
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
he General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to all organizations that do business with EU citizens, regardless of whether the company is located inside or outside the EU. Failure to comply can result in fines of up to 4% of worldwide sales or 20 million euros. The GDPR protects personal data such as name, ID number, date or address of birth, web analytics data, medical information, and biometric data.
Data Protection Strategy
Every organization needs a data protection strategy. Here are a few pillars of a robust strategy:
- Audit of Sensitive Data
- Assessing Internal and External Risks
- Defining a Data Protection Policy
- Security Strategy
- Compliance Strategy
Audit of Sensitive Data
Before adopting data protection controls, you must first perform an audit of your data. Identify data sources, data types, and storage infrastructure used throughout the organization.
Classify data into sensitivity levels, and see what data protection measures already exist in the organization, how effective they are, and which can be extended to protect more sensitive data. Often, the biggest potential is in leveraging existing data protection systems that are “lying around” or are not used consistently throughout the organization.
Assessing Internal and External Risks
The security team in the organization should regularly assess security risks that may arise inside and outside the organization. Data protection programs must be designed around these known risks.
Internal risks include errors in IT configuration or security policies, the lack of strong passwords, poor authentication, and user access management, and unrestricted access to storage services or devices. A growing threat is malicious insiders or compromised accounts that have been taken over by threat actors.
External risks include social engineering strategies such as phishing, malware distribution, and attacks on corporate infrastructure such as SQL injection or distributed denial of service (DDoS). These and many most security threats are commonly used by attackers to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and exfiltrate it.
Defining a Data Protection Policy
Based on the organization’s analysis of its data assets, and the most relevant threats, it should develop a data protection policy that determines:
- The tolerance for risk for every data category — data protection has a cost, and protection measures must be applied in accordance with the sensitivity of the data.
- Authorization and authentication policy— use best practices and historical information to identify which business applications or user accounts should have access to sensitive data.
Data Security Strategy
With respect to data protection, an organization’s security strategy should:
- Take measures to prevent threat actors from accessing sensitive data.
- Ensure that security measures do not hurt productivity or prevent employees from accessing data when and where they need it.
- Manage backups effectively to prevent ransomware or other threats, and ensure constant data availability.
Compliance Strategy
Finally, a data protection strategy must consider compliance obligations. Organizations or specific business units may be subject to a variety of regulations or industry-specific compliance standards. Below are the most significant regulations affecting data protection today.
