What is Data Security?
Data security can be defined as the practice of protecting digital information from unauthorized access, data theft, or corruption throughout its lifecycle.
The concept of data security includes a wide variety of information security issues. It starts with the physical security of hardware with access controls and consists of the logical security of an organization’s procedures policies and software apps.
Proactive data security strategies can help protect an organization’s data assets against cyber crimes. They also help guard businesses from human errors and insider threats, which are some of the premier causes of cyber security breaches today.
Importance of Data Security
There are multiple reasons why data security is important for various businesses and industries all over the world. Organizations have to protect crucial customer and user data from theft or loss as these end up in the wrong hands.
Data security becomes vital for preventing the risk of reputation that comes with a data breach. A high-profile data loss or hacking has a negative impact on the trust of the customers in an organization. This also includes the risk of financial losses like legal payments, fines as well as damage repair, depending on the nature of the sensitivity of the data lost.
Types of Data Security
Business organizations can make use of the different types of cyber security measures to ensure the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of crucial and sensitive information. Here are the various types of data security measures organizations can implement-
1. Encryption
Data encryption allows the transforming of readable information into an unreadable format using by using an algorithm. Encryption keys help in jumbling data, ensuring that only authorized people can read it. File and data encryption software can be used as the ultimate defense for sensitive data by covering encryption or tokenization.
2. Data Erasure
This type of data security measure utilizes software for fully overwriting data on a storage device. This makes a secure option for protecting data in comparison to data wiping. It helps in verifying that the data is unrecoverable.
3. Data Masking
Data masking allows businesses to develop applications as well as train people that make use of real data. It enables the masking of information that is identifiable whenever necessary to foster development in environments that are compliant in nature.
4. Data Resiliency
This depends on the capability of an organization to overcome a failure. This failure can include hardware problems, power shortages, and any other event affecting the availability of data. The speed of data recovery is crucial for minimizing impact.
Data Security Technologies & Tools for Organizations
Data security tools and technologies are capable of addressing the growing challenges related to security in hybrid, complex, or multi-cloud environments. These also need understating of the data storage locations, blocking of activities in high risks, tracking who can access the data storage locations, and dangerous file movements.
There is a set of comprehensive data protection tools that allow businesses to develop a centralized approach for data monitoring and policy enforcement. Here are the set of tools that you should be aware of-
Data discovery and classification tools
These tools help in actively locating crucial and sensitive data within both structured as well as unstructured data repositories. These data repositories can include databases, big data platforms, data warehouses, and cloud environments. These tools help in automating the identification process of crucial data as well as the assessing and remediation of the vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability assessment and risk analyzing tools
Vulnerability assessment and risk analyzing tools simplify the process of finding out and eliminating vulnerabilities like weak passwords, and out-of-date software. These can also be used for identifying sources of data at the risk of exposure.
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
These tools can take you a step ahead to discovering shadow data, uncovering vulnerabilities, decreasing exposure, and prioritizing risks. Ongoing monitoring offers real-time dashboards, allowing the teams to focus on remediation and prevention.
Data and file activity monitoring
Data and file activity monitoring tools help in analyzing patterns of data usage. This allows the security teams to find out the people assessing data, find out risks, and identify anomalies. Security teams can also implement dynamic catering and blocking in the case of unusual activity patterns.
Automated Compliance Reporting
Robust data protection solutions along with automatic reporting capabilities can offer a centralized repository for business-wide compliance audit trials.
Benefits of Data Security
Data security can be better defined by discussing its benefits. So, here are the various advantages of data security-
I. Keeps Information Safe
By implementing the right data security measures and adopting a mindset centered on data security, you can make sure that crucial information does not end up in the wrong hands. Sensitive information or data can include anything related to customer information, identification numbers, medical records, etc. Businesses can create a data security program tailored to their data security needs can keep these sets of crucial information safe.
II. Saves Business Reputation
When people choose to buy your services or products or do business with your business, they entrust you with their crucial information. A robust data security strategy provides the kind of protection they need. In return, you can maintain a stellar reputation among clients and customers among partners, clients, and the business world in general.
III. Gives Competitive Edge
In various industries, data breaches are a common thing. So, once you crack the code of keeping data secure, you can stay ahead of competitors.
IV. Saves on support and development costs
If you include data security measures early during the development process, you can save a considerable amount of valuable resources for deploying patches or correcting coding problems in the long run.
What are Some of the Biggest Data Security Risks?
Business organizations face a highly complex landscape of data security threats as cybersecurity attackers have become more sophisticated. Here are some of the biggest cyber security risks-
1. Accidental Exposure of Data
Data breaches are not always the result of hacking. At times, even the employees can accidentally expose sensitive information. Business employees can lose, share, or give access to crucial data to the wrong person. They can mishandle or lose valuable information if they are not well aware of the security policies of their company.
2. Phishing Attacks
In the case of a phishing attack, a cybercriminal sends a message mainly via email or instant messaging services, that appears to be sent by a reliable sender. This message often contains malicious links or attachments, resulting in the download of malware by the recipient. It also leads to the recipient visiting a spoofed website, allowing the hacker to steal financial data or login credentials.
Phishing attacks also help the attacker get access to business networks or compromise the devices of the users. These attacks are mostly paired with social engineering and are used by attackers to manipulate victims into sharing crucial and sensitive information like login credentials to privileged accounts.
3. Insider Threats
These are among the biggest data security threats that a company can face. Insider threats happen when an employee either intentionally or unintentionally risks their organization’s data. Insider threats can be of two types- compromised insider, malicious insider, and nonmalicious insider.
Composer insider threat occurs when an employee is not aware that their account credential is compromised. Cyber attackers can perform malicious activities by framing the user. A malicious insider is an employee who steals data from their business organization for their gain. While nonmalicious insiders are the ones who cause harm accidentally. It can be a result of the employee’s negligent behavior by not following companies security policies, or if they are not aware of the data security rules.
4. Ransomware
Ransomware attacks pose great danger to businesses of all sizes. It is a kind of malware that helps infect various devices as well as encrypting the information on data available on them. The hackers then demand a ransom amount in exchange for returning their data, Some of these ransomware attacks spread faster and infect the whole network. These can also affect the backup data servers.
5. Malware
Malware can be defined as software that spreads through emails or occurs in the form of web-based attacks. The attackers utilize malware to infect corporate networks as well as computers by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the software. This can cause serious data breaches in events such as extortion, network damage, and data theft.
6. Cloud Data Storage
Most businesses are now moving their data to cloud storage to allow easy sharing and collaboration. However, storing data in the cloud makes it difficult to protect and control it from data loss. In the cloud, users access data via personal devices on networks that are not very secure. Thus, it becomes easier to maliciously compromise data with unauthorized parties.
Conclusion
To sum up, data security is critical to safeguarding the information that is an organization’s most important asset. Businesses may reduce risks like ransomware, insider threats, and unintentional disclosure by putting proactive measures like encryption, data masking, and constant monitoring into place. To protect your digital assets, work together with DC Technologies to provide professional data security services.