Data security is a critical aspect of any business’s infrastructure. It safeguards sensitive information from hackers and ensures the authorized personnel have access to it. Data security also helps organizations to comply with the rules of the industry and maintain employee and customer trust.
The most commonly used security measures for data protection involve a combination of access control, encryption and other tools that can help safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of your organization’s data. The encryption process scrambles data so that it is unreadable by anyone who does not have the key. Access control employs roles and policies to restrict access to files or databases, based on the least privilege principle. Other tools, such as tokenization and masking, substitute sensitive information with less sensitive representations that are still useful to authorized users but that hackers are unable to exploit.
Backups and other redundant copies are also required in order to ensure that you can recover in the event of cyber-attacks or hardware failures. To protect against data loss or unauthorised modifications it is recommended to keep regular, full, differential and incremental backups in different locations.
A majority of the most effective methods to secure your data are simple and inexpensive, such as requiring strong passwords and regular changing of credentials. Employee training can transform employees into human firewalls, helping them recognize and thwart attacks by social engineering. Other security measures for data include multi-factor authentication as well as safeguarding networks and devices from unauthorised access. In addition, a data privacy policy and clear communications can help customers understand the ways in which their personal information is used by your organization and permit them to opt out of any collection.