Data is a company’s most important asset. It is vital to protect your data, whether it is financial reports, healthcare information, or a start-up company plan, no matter what field you are in.
This post will teach you all you need to know about Data Security Challenges and Solutions. Despite strengthened data security regulations, the chance of a data breach is increasing. According to Capita, 80 percent of data breaches contain personally identifiable information, with each record costing $150. Let’s observe:
- What exactly is data security?
- What is the method for developing a data security strategy?
- Why are businesses concerned about data security?
- Which data must be safeguarded?
- Steps to Improve Your Data Security
- What technologies aid in data security?
- Conclusion
- How can Connectech help you with the challenges and solutions of data security?
What exactly is data security?
Data security, often known as information security, refers to the techniques, policies, and concepts used to safeguard digital data and other types of information. The “CIA trinity” of data security standards is built on three fundamental concepts: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- Confidentiality: Maintaining confidentiality entails avoiding unauthorized access to sensitive material to protect it from reaching the wrong individuals.
Organizations should employ security mechanisms such as access control lists (ACLs) based on the principle of least privilege, encryption, two-factor authentication and strong passwords, configuration management, and monitoring and alerting to safeguard confidentiality.
- Integrity: Data integrity refers to data protection against unauthorized deletion or change. A digital signature, which is commonly used by government and healthcare institutions to authenticate information validity and protect transactions, is one technique to assure integrity.
- Availability: It necessitates ensuring that security measures, computer systems, and software function effectively to guarantee that services and information systems are available when required. For example, for your accountants to communicate, pay, or execute transactions, your financial database must be accessible.
Do you want to learn more? Discover the differences between software and web development
What is the method for developing a data security strategy?
Organizations do not need to develop a data security plan from the ground up. Instead, they may use well-established tools such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework, which can assist you in understanding your security threats, prioritizing your security activities, and calculating the ROI of your cyber security spending.
The NIST framework has five essential functions:
- Identify. Recognize and record the cyber security threats to your systems, people, assets, data, and capabilities.
- Protect. Put proper security controls and other safeguards to protect your most valuable assets from cyber-attacks.
- Detect. Make sure you can rapidly identify behaviors and occurrences that might jeopardize your data security.
- Respond. Prepare verified methods to respond quickly to cyber security problems.
- Recover. Implement techniques to ensure that you can swiftly recover data and services that a security event has compromised.
Why are businesses concerned about data security?
Today, data security is a significant priority for many enterprises. Here are the primary reasons.
Compliance
Compliance obligations also drive data security. Data privacy laws, in particular the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), rigorously govern how businesses gather, retain, and utilize personally identifiable information (PII).
Failure to comply may be costly; for example, GDPR penalties can exceed 20 million euros or 4% of a company’s worldwide yearly revenue for the previous fiscal year.
Furthermore, authorities have the authority to give warnings and reprimands and, in severe circumstances, to prohibit the organization from processing personal data.
Meeting compliance regulations is essential for an effective data security plan, but ticking the boxes during compliance audits is not enough.
Regulations often concentrate on specific areas of data security (such as data privacy), but real-world security risks grow quicker than legislation. Sensitive data protection should be considered as a long-term, continuing effort.
Breach of data
A data breach, often known as a data leak, is a security incident that occurs when sensitive data is accessed or revealed to unauthorized readers. These are some of the data breaches reasons:
- Theft or loss of devices holding sensitive data.
- Cyber-attacks in which hackers circumvent your security mechanisms and get access to critical software or your security platform.
- Human mistakes, such as inadvertently giving sensitive material to someone who cannot read it.
- Employees or other internal users, such as contractors or partners, steal data.
Data breaches may have significant financial consequences. It can disrupt corporate operations, resulting in a loss of revenue for the corporation.
A breach may also result in legal fees, and if it includes a violation of a compliance or industry requirement, the regulatory authority can levy fines or apply other penalties. Furthermore, the organization’s reputation and client trust may suffer long-term harm.
Cyber security skills
According to a 2020 (ISC) survey, the industry needs around 3 million more trained cyber security personnel, and 64 percent of cyber security professionals feel the cyber security skills shortage affects their firm.
Because of the skills scarcity, they cannot mitigate risk, identify risks, or react to assaults.
Cloud safety
Since the Covid-19 epidemic started, cloud use has skyrocketed, as businesses wanted to provide choices for workers to work from home. Cloud data security was suddenly on everyone’s mind.
Previously, data security solutions primarily focused on keeping hostile attackers out of systems containing sensitive data. However, with cloud computing, data is kept in systems beyond the conventional boundary and may easily travel everywhere.
As a result, companies need a data-centric security approach that prioritizes their most critical data.
Which data must be safeguarded?
Companies are often required to secure two categories of data:
- Personal information includes employee HR and payroll data, customer profiles, supplier contracts, and personal medical histories.
- Business-critical data refers to the data assets required to run and maintain your business. Financial planning, inventories, and intellectual property like designs and trade secrets are examples.
A good cyber security plan differentiates the protection of the company’s information assets, providing the most critical data with the most significant level of protection.
Otherwise, you’ll spend time and money attempting to protect every file and folder, whether they contain essential intellectual property or merely images from the corporate picnic.
Here you will find out the benefits of online/digital marketing
Steps to Improve Your Data Security
The following suggestions can assist you in strengthening your data security:
#1. Determine data security threats.
Begin by identifying and quantifying the security risks of how your IT systems handle, store, and provide access to sensitive and business-critical data. Specifically:
- Create a risk-management plan. Identifying, analyzing, and mitigating security threats are essential components of a sound data security program, and many compliance standards also mandate it. Instead of starting from scratch, consider starting with a framework, such as the NIST risk assessment framework specified in SP 800-30.
- Locate dormant user accounts in your directory. Identify any user accounts that haven’t been used in a while and collaborate with your business colleagues to determine whether you may delete them. Then determine why such accounts remained active and correct the underlying procedures.
Is the IT team, for example, contacted when an employee leaves the organization or a contractor’s job is completed? If not, the related accounts might become inactive, even if they still have access to systems and data. Finding dormant accounts to attack is pretty simple for a hacker.
A simple search on LinkedIn or Twitter, for example, may disclose who has recently departed an organization. Taking over a dormant account allows an attacker to examine your network without raising any alarms discreetly.
- Scan your surroundings for possibly hazardous files regularly. You should regularly search for unapproved executables, installers, and scripts and delete them so that no one mistakenly releases ransomware or other malware.
- Locate accounts with unneeded administrative rights. Few people need administrative-level access, and offering anybody more powers than they require may be risky.
#2. Perform a server inventory.
Make a list of all your servers, including the purpose of each and the data held on them. You should, in particular:
- Antivirus up-to-date. Although antivirus software cannot prevent every sort of cyber-attack, it is an essential first line of protection.
- Look into alternative programs and services. Unwanted software on your server does more than take up space; these applications pose a security concern since they may have sufficient rights to change your sensitive data.
- Examine your operating systems. Check that no servers are running an operating system that the vendor no longer supports. Because obsolete operating systems do not get security updates, they are an appealing target for hackers who can exploit any system weaknesses quickly.
This inventory will assist you in identifying and closing critical security holes. Remember that this is not a one-time event.
#3. Understand your data.
You must know where your vital data is to secure it. Scan your data storage, both in the cloud and on-premises, using data discovery and categorization technologies, and label sensitive or regulated data by kind and purpose.
Then you can correctly prioritize your data security initiatives to increase data security and maintain regulatory compliance.
Also, keep an eye out for sensitive data that appears in the wrong places, is made accessible to a large number of individuals, or is generally overexposed. Take action as soon as possible to decrease the risk of data loss and exfiltration.
#4. Implement and sustain a least-privilege paradigm.
It’s critical to limit each user’s access rights to just what they need to complete their job; it restricts the harm that an employee may do, whether intentionally or unintentionally, as well as the power of an attacker who gains control of a user account.
You don’t want a sales representative’s account, for example, to have access to secret financial records.
Check everyone, including administrators, users, executives, contractors, and partners. Repeat the evaluation regularly, and put systems in place to prevent overprovisioning.
One typical flaw is forgetting to remove rights that a person no longer requires while changing jobs within the business; for example, an account manager who transitions to a technical support engineer should no longer have access to client billing databases.
#5 Keep an eye out for any unusual behavior.
It’s also vital to carefully monitor activities in your IT environment, particularly any efforts to access, edit, or destroy sensitive data. You must detect and analyze what, where, when, and how individuals, especially administrators and highly privileged users, access data. You should, in particular:
- Monitor behavior beyond business hours – Users may store harmful conduct until after-hours when they believe no one is looking.
- Keep an eye out for surges in user activity. Sudden spurts of activity are suspicious and should be looked into right away. For example, a significant number of files being deleted quickly might indicate a ransomware attack in process or an unhappy employee wanting to quit the firm.
What technologies aid in data security?
Modern data security procedures include putting in place a complete set of safeguards. The NIST CSF and other frameworks give thorough control libraries for guarding against risks. However, below is a summary of some of the leading technologies to consider:
Data backup and recovery
Organizations must quickly restore data and operations, whether a user has inadvertently deleted a single file that they now need, a server has failed, or a natural catastrophe or targeted assault has taken the whole network down.
Your disaster recovery strategy should include a detailed procedure for recovering lost data and managing incident response.
To secure their essential IT assets, organizations use a wide range of advanced data security methods and approaches. On the other hand, adequate data security involves more than simply technological safeguards.
Data finding and categorization
Data categorization is the process of labeling sensitive data with tags to safeguard data based on its value or relevant legal requirements.
Analytics on user and entity activity (UEBA)
It is beneficial for identifying insider threats and compromised accounts.
Management of identity and access (IAM)
IAM assists businesses in managing regular and privileged user accounts and controlling user access to essential information.
Management of change and audits
Inadequate alterations to IT systems, whether accidental or deliberate, may result in downtime and security vulnerabilities. Setting up proper change management processes and reviewing actual modifications might assist you in detecting misconfigurations as soon as possible.
Conclusion
The key to keeping your data safe is to develop risk-based data security practices. You can improve data security and compliance by identifying and categorizing your data, analyzing and minimizing IT risks, and implementing appropriate controls.
Consider beginning with a best-practice framework, such as the NIST CSF, and then looking for security solutions that will assist you in automating essential operations and providing the necessary information. Remember that data security is a continuous activity, not a one-time event.
How can Connectech help you with the challenges and solutions of data security?
Obtaining protection is one of the essential elements to consider while running a company. In the realm of technology, investors and business owners may discover a plethora of hazards that can severely affect their operations.
The most prevalent hazards are cyber-attacks by hackers, who may come from any nation since the internet has no boundaries.
Connect Tech’s professionals in IT, marketing, security, and software development assist organizations in increasing their efficiency.
That is why Connectech is the best company to assist you with this. Connectech is the most significant partner you could select, with over 20 years of market expertise. Allow us to collaborate with you to safeguard your services and websites.
Would you like to contact Connectech with the challenges and solutions of data security? If you have any questions, call us on +971 433 16 688. You can email us at contact@connectech.dev, and you will talk to one of our representatives who will answer your questions.
