Data Protection Strategies
Nearly every company recognizes data’s ability to improve customer and employee experiences and business choices. Data is growing harder to safeguard as it grows more valuable. Hybrid architectures disperse vital data across cloud, third-party, and on premises locations, while threat actors find novel ways to exploit weaknesses.
After focusing more on data protection, many organizations found a lack of explicit rules and recommendations. Every data protection strategy is different, but here are some critical elements and best practices to consider for your organisation.
What is Data protection strategy?
A data protection strategy protects critical company data from loss and corruption. As with data protection, its goals are data protection and availability.
Data protection strategies usually focus on three areas to meet these principles:
- Digital data security preventing unauthorized access, corruption, and theft throughout its existence.
- Data availability keeping essential corporate data accessible during data breaches, virus, and ransomware attacks.
- Access control limiting important info to those who need it.
Data protection varies from data security since it prioritizes accessibility and availability. Data protection goes beyond data security in protecting digital data from threats and unauthorized access. It supports data protection, authentication, backup, storage, and regulatory compliance, as in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Backups, restores, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans like disaster recovery as a service are now part of most data protection strategies. These holistic techniques dissuade threat actors, standardize critical data and corporate information security management, and reduce business downtime.
Its importance to your security strategy
Data drives the global economy, and thieves know its value. Data theft cyberattacks are rising. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach found that the global average cost to remediate a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, up 15% over three years.
Data breaches can harm people in various ways. Unexpected downtime can cost a company business, customers, and reputation, and stolen intellectual property can affect its profitability and competitiveness.
Data breach victims often face high fines or punitive penalties. Companies must follow GDPR and HIPAA to protect customer data.
Firms priorities data protection in cybersecurity because it prevents data breaches and ensures regulatory compliance. More importantly, a good data protection strategy can improve business operations and reduce cyberattack downtime, saving time and money.
Elements for data protection Strategy
There are numerous data protection strategies you should consider, but each should be suited to your organisation.
Data lifecycle management
Data lifecycle management (DLM) helps organizations manage data from entry to deletion. It divides data into phases based on criteria and goes through them to fulfil tasks. DLM involves data production, storage, sharing, usage, archiving, and destruction.
When organizations use many data storage methods, a good DLM procedure helps organize and structure vital data. It can also reduce vulnerabilities and ensure data is efficiently maintained, consistent with regulations, and not misused or lost.
Controlling data access
Access controls restrict data access to authorized users to prevent unauthorized use, transfer, or access. They block danger actors while giving employees only the permissions they need to conduct their jobs. Organizations can utilize RBAC, MFA, or regular permission reviews.
Identity and access management (IAM) projects streamline access controls and secure assets without affecting company processes. All users receive a digital identity with rights based on their role, compliance, and other considerations.
Encrypting data
Data encryption uses encryption techniques to transform plaintext into ciphertext. This ensures that unauthorized users cannot comprehend or utilize encrypted data without a decryption key.
Data security requires encryption. It secures sensitive data in transit and at rest on devices and servers. To keep sensitive data secure and unreadable, authorized users only decrypt when needed.
Manage data risk
Organizations must understand their risks to secure data. To comprehend an organization’s data kinds, storage locations, and users, data risk management entails a complete audit/risk assessment.
Following this assessment, companies identify threats and vulnerabilities and mitigate risk. These methods close security gaps and improve data security and cybersecurity. Examples include increasing security, updating data protection rules, training employees, and buying new technology.
Ongoing risk assessments can also help organizations identify new data risks and adjust their security.
Backup and restore data
Backup and disaster recovery involves periodically creating or updating more copies of files, storing them in one or more remote locations, and using them to resume business operations after data loss due to file damage, corruption, cyberattack, or natural disaster.
Some confuse the sub processes ‘backup’ with ‘disaster recovery’. Disaster recovery is the plan and method for quickly restoring access to programmed, data, and IT resources following an outage, while backup is the act of making file copies. That plan may involve transitioning to redundant servers and storage until your core data Centre is back up.
DRAaS is managed disaster recovery. Disaster recovery infrastructure is hosted and managed by a third party. Some DRaaS providers may give tools or manage disaster recovery processes for organizations.
Managing data storage
When moving data, organizations need good security. Otherwise, they risk data loss, cyberattacks, and breaches.
Data storage management simplifies this procedure by decreasing hybrid and cloud storage vulnerabilities. It handles all production data transfer activities to on-premises or cloud data repositories securely. These stores provide frequent, high-performance access or archive for infrequent retrieval.
Response to incident
Incident response (IR) systems and tools help companies detect and stop cyberattacks. It tries to avoid and mitigate cyberattack costs and economic impact.
Incident response can help organizations battle cybercriminals more proactively by integrating it into their data protection strategy.
The Cost of a Data Breach 2023 found that organizations with high IR countermeasures had USD 1.49 million lower data breach expenses and resolved events 54 days faster.
Complete data inventory
Catalogue all firm data with a data inventory. To priorities security, determine each data type’s sensitivity and criticality, then update the inventory with usage and storage changes.
Keep stakeholders informed
Communicate your data protection plan and methodology to executives, vendors, suppliers, customers, and PR and marketing staff. Open communication will increase trust, transparency, and awareness of data protection strategy, empowering employees and others to make smarter cybersecurity decisions.
Train security awareness
Data protection strategy security awareness training for your complete staff. Cybercriminals exploit human frailty, making insider threats a major issue and employees the first line of defense. Presentations, webinars, courses, and more help staff identify security dangers and secure sensitive data.
Conduct regular risk evaluations
Continuous risk assessments and analysis assist prevent data breaches. Risk assessments let you examine your data footprint and security procedures, pinpoint weaknesses, and update data protection rules. Additionally, some data protection strategy laws demand them.
Ensure strict documentation
Documenting sensitive data in a mixed IT system is difficult but essential for data protection. Keep rigorous records for regulators, executives, vendors, and others during audits, investigations, and cybersecurity occurrences. Updated documentation improves efficiency, openness, accountability, and data protection. Data protection rules and processes should also be updated to combat new cyber risks.
Continue monitoring
Monitoring data activity in real time allows for quick vulnerability detection and repair. It may be required by data protection legislation. Monitor data operations to ensure compliance with data protection policies even when it’s not required. It can also evaluate security measures for organizations.
While strategies will vary by industry, geography, customer needs, and other considerations, identifying these fundamentals can help your organisation strengthen its data protection.
