The growing dependency on digital technologies is becoming a way of life, and at the same time, the collection of data using them for surveillance operations has raised concerns as some industries require a high level of data security to comply with data protection regulations.
Even if an organization is not subject to a regulation or compliance standard, the survival of a modern business depends on data security, which can impact both the organization’s key assets and private data belonging to its customers.
What is Data Security?
Data security is the process of protecting corporate data and preventing data loss through unauthorized access. This includes protecting your data from attacks that can encrypt or destroy data, such as ransomware, as well as attacks that can modify or corrupt your data. Data security also ensures data is available to anyone in the organization who has access to it.
Data Security vs Data Privacy
Data privacy is the distinction between data in a computer system that can be shared with third parties (non-private data), and data that cannot be shared with third parties (private data). There are two main aspects to enforcing data privacy:
- Access control: Ensuring that anyone who tries to access the data is authenticated to confirm their identity, and authorized to access only the data they are allowed to access.
- Data protection: Ensuring that even if unauthorized parties manage to access the data, they cannot view it or cause damage to it. Data protection methods ensure encryption, which prevents anyone from viewing data if they do not have a private encryption key, and data loss prevention mechanisms which prevent users from transferring sensitive data outside the organization.
Data Security Challenges:
Below are several common issues faced by organizations of all sizes as they attempt to secure sensitive data:
- Phishing and Other Social Engineering Attacks: Social engineering attacks are a primary vector used by attackers to access sensitive data. They involve manipulating or tricking individuals into providing private information or access to privileged accounts.
- Accidental Exposure: A large percentage of data breaches are not the result of a malicious attack but are caused by negligent or accidental exposure of sensitive data. It is common for an organization’s employees to share, grant access to, lose, or mishandle valuable data, either by accident or because they are not aware of security policies.
- Ransomware: Ransomware is a major threat to data in companies of all sizes. Ransomware is malware that infects corporate devices and encrypts data, making it useless without the decryption key. Attackers display a ransom message asking for payment to release the key, but in many cases, even paying the ransom is ineffective and the data is lost.
- Data Loss in the Cloud: Many organizations are moving data to the cloud to facilitate easier sharing and collaboration. However, when data moves to the cloud, it is more difficult to control and prevent data loss. Users access data from personal devices and over unsecured networks. It is all too easy to share a file with unauthorized parties, either accidentally or maliciously.
Some of Data Security Solutions and Techniques
Data Discovery and Classification
Modern IT environments store data on servers, endpoints, and cloud systems. Visibility over data flows is an important first step in understanding what data is at risk of being stolen or misused. To properly protect your data, you need to know the type of data, where it is, and what it is used for.
Data Masking
Data masking lets you create a synthetic version of your organizational data, which you can use for software testing, training, and other purposes that don’t require the real data. The goal is to protect data while providing a functional alternative when needed.
Data Encryption
Data encryption is a method of converting data from a readable format (plaintext) to an unreadable encoded format (ciphertext). Only after decrypting the encrypted data using the decryption key, the data can be read or processed.
Authentication and Authorization
Organizations must put in place strong authentication methods, such as OAuth for web-based systems. It is highly recommended to enforce multi-factor authentication when any user, whether internal or external, requests sensitive or personal data.
Cloud Security
In an enterprise environment, cloud security should be a critical part of the organization’s security strategy. An effective strategy involves protecting cloud infrastructure, cloud workloads, and the data itself.
CRM Security
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a combination of practices, strategies, and technologies that businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. CRM data is highly sensitive because it can expose an organization’s most valuable asset and customer relationships
Data Security Solutions with Bizzyeasy:
- User Access Control: Bizzyeasy offers advanced access control features which ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data.
- Data masking and Encryption: To protect data both in transit and at rest, Bizzyeasy uses robust encryption methods.
- User behavior analytics: establishes baselines of data access behavior, uses machine learning to detect and alert on abnormal and potentially risky activity.
- Multi-factor Authentication: By implementing a multi-factor authentication mechanism, Bizzyeasy can add an extra layer of security to prevent unauthorized access.
- Data loss prevention (DLP): Inspects data in motion, at rest on servers, in cloud storage, or on endpoint devices.
- Safe Data Transmission: Bizzyeasy provides secure methods for sharing and transmitting data to maintain confidentiality and integrity.
- User rights management: Monitors data access and activities of privileged users to identify excessive, inappropriate, and unused privileges.
- Regular Backups and Data Recovery: Regular backups can protect against data loss, and recovery tools could restore lost data in case of accidents or system failures.
- Database firewall: Blocks SQL injection and other threats, while evaluating for known vulnerabilities.
- Antivirus and Anti-Malware Protection: Integrating with leading antivirus and anti-malware software could help protect against malicious threats.
- Compliance Tools: Bizzyeasy offers tools to help businesses stay compliant with data protection regulations like GDPR, enhancing trust and reputation, and avoiding regulatory penalties.
- Intrusion Detection and Prevention: Advanced intrusion detection and prevention systems could constantly monitor for any suspicious activities, offering immediate alerts and responses.
- Regular Security Updates: Providing ongoing security patches and updates could protect against new security threats and vulnerabilities.
- Alert prioritization—Imperva uses AI and machine learning technology to look across the stream of security events and prioritize the ones that matter most.