It’s common knowledge that data is the new oil. Since data is so precious and difficult to mine and collect, it’s important to have a strict data security policy in your company.
Irrespective of the size of your company or the industry it is in, data security should be one of the top most priorities for you.
In this article, we will talk about the importance of data security and the best practices related to data security.
Interesting Read: All You Need to Know About Payment Gateways’ Security Systems
Why is Data Security Important?
Companies invest a lot of money and human resources to get their hands on different types of data. It ranges from customer data, website data, financial data, intellectual property, employee information, health records, etc.
By owning such precious data you have the responsibility of keeping them secure from either getting lost, or getting into the hands of hackers or competitors.
Data Privacy | Data Security |
| Decides how data is collected and shared | Protects data from hackers |
| Decides which data is important and why | Enforces policies to secure important data |
| Privacy tools include: browser extensions, private browsers, web proxies, email services, file encryption software, etc. | Security tools include: data masking software, tokenisation, anti-malware, anti-virus, etc. |
There are various instances where companies have become a victim of data theft and later have had to pay a large ransom money to hackers. In other instances, companies have had to deal with data getting lost due to not having proper data security policy in place.
Right from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Domino’s to Ebay, Yahoo!, and Equifax, companies have had to face the music whenever data breaches happen. Whenever an incident of data breach takes place, customers lose their faith in the company and it has to start building the brand from scratch to gain the customers’ trust.
What are the consequences of data theft?
Data security is of utmost importance for the wellbeing and smooth running of your company. If your company’s virtually stored data is compromised, you will be looking at severe ramifications, some of which can be categorised as below:
- Damage to your reputation: As a result of data theft, chances are you customers will have a difficult time trusting you with their personal details.
- Financial loss: The group or person who has hacked into your system to steal data will ask for a ransom. This has the potential of leaving a long-lasting financial impact on your company.
- Open to legal action: One of the trickiest aftermaths of lapses in data security and privacy is that your company might have to face legal action from customers and other companies whose data you might have had.
- Operational downtime: It is quite common for operations to come to a stand still in cases of data breach as it takes a long time to restore the data and files necessary for employees to begin work.
What are the Types of Data Security?
Businesses can ensure that their internal policy on data security and privacy is top notch by understanding different types of data security tools that are available.
Depending on the kind of security you want to put in place for data protection, you can choose which type of data security tool to use. Here are the different types of data security options that you have:
Interesting Read: Secure Payment System (SPS): All You Need to Know
- Data masking
The data masking process includes removing the real data with fake ones but at the same time keeping the format of the data the same. You can mask your data by altering the contents with pretend information, shuffling the words or numbers, or encrypting them altogether. Tokenization is an example of a data masking tool.
Companies use data masking tools for information that they have to use in presentations to customers, investors, or even interview candidates. In such scenarios, it becomes important that without divulging company data to others you show customers and investors what your company or product does
- Firewalls
Firewall is a software program that keeps an eye on incoming and outgoing traffic as well as filters them based on your company’s data security policy. It is like a gatekeeper that checks each and every web page accessed from your company’s private network for any data theft threat.
You should install a firewall on employees’ devices as part of an initial security layer. It will block the IP addresses that you consider might be a threat.
- Authentication and authorisation
Authentication and authorisation go hand-in-hand as a data security tool that companies must use to safeguard their enterprise data.
As a part of the data security policy, only those individuals who are authorised should be able to access the system. To ensure that only authorised users are accessing company data, you should set-up authentication tools such as two-factor or multiple authentications.
To get authorised for accessing a system, users can go through an authentication process, which includes entering a password, fingerprint scan, or an OTP.
- Data backup
While using different types of data security tools to protect the company data is advisable, you should also invest in data backup and recovery systems.
In an unfortunate event when your data is compromised and stolen, you should have a backup of all your data. This will ensure that day-to-day business functions do not get affected due to the data breach.
Many companies use the 3-2-1 strategy to backup their data. It simply means that for every data set you make three backup copies, store them on two storage media devices, and for enhanced security keep a copy of the backup at a secret off-site location.
- Encryption
Every company has data that has to be approved by different parties in order to get the work done. For example, to make digital payment customers’ card details have to be approved by banks and payment gateways. In such cases, companies are mandated to encrypt payment details so that no one can have access to it.
The biggest benefit of encrypting data is that even if hackers get hold of the encrypted data, they will not be able to do anything with it.
Conclusion
The impact that data security has on your business warrants your special focus so that you can handle the matter in a better way. You should have a strong data security policy for employees and vendors.
Having strong data security checks and balances in place will take time and is definitely not something that you can implement in one-go.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question: What are the best practices to follow for data security?
Answer: While dealing with data security and privacy, you should have a handy list of best practices. Here are a few of them:
- Do regular analysis of possible vulnerabilities and security breaches
- Create detailed reports about any small or big data breach or intrusion alerts
- Keep yourself and your team updated on the latest data security tools and incidents of data leaks in the industry
- If possible, implement bring your own device policy in your company
- Perform a regular data security check on every employee’s device
