Data protection is most relevant among businesses, primarily in the digital world. Data protection includes the use of a collection of data, which is only accessible to authorized users.
Data protection strategies are applied to every data storage infrastructure and data storage device with the intent that data can be retrieved effortlessly without any data loss when the system crashes. There are different aspects where data needs protection and we need to identify loopholes in data safety and privacy protection system.
Security Measures in order to secure data
- Access controls on network:
Data is stored in different locations, like laptops computers, these are personal data storage systems that are generally used to store sensitive information. Controlling who can access the data is a basic security measure that can be taken in order to protect the data. Once you know the location data and the confidentiality of the data, we can define more clear accessibility to other users.
Sensitive data can be in different forms like trade secrets of business, information of clients, source code of a product. Every piece of data requires a different level of accessibility and giving access to only the authorized users is the first step of precautionary measure to protect the data
- Providing a protective suite to data storage centers:
Backing up data is really not sufficient to safeguard the data. There can be a risk of a cyber breach and it should be the primary step to isolate the data servers against cyber attackers and malwares. Safeguarding data with antivirus provides another layer of security, establishing a strong firewall between the internet and data centers can be another way of protecting data.
- Using Automated back-up systems:
Data centers can be backed up manually, as well as with automated tools, however, there is a huge volume of data on data centers and it requires more effort and time to back up the data from such data centers, especially at unfavorable conditions like system crash or downtime issues. Cloud backups have gained this chance and provided the solution for this, due to which backing up data is more reliable. This is useful for small scale companies, who cannot afford huge data centers due to short cash flows.
- Identifying the risk of data breach from BYOD(bring your own device):
The integration of most of the IT companies of bringing your own device is definitely beneficial in terms of finances but on other the hand, there is a huge risk of a data breach.
As we are not completely aware of the configurations of each device most of the companies do not allow personal phones on the floor, usually companies which are in US health care insurance domain due to HIPPA(Health insurance portability and accountability act)
Use of data encryption is one of the standards of data protection such as using pin code access, data protection measures under a situation of failed login attempts.
Setting up a baseline of security to data access for employees.
- Considering implications for cloud computing security:
Cloud computing companies offer more cost-effective data-centers, which help to promote organizational efficiency, this also provides us the benefit of accessing the data to authorized users remotely. Instead of taking a decision of transferring data to a cloud, we are indirectly passing the responsibility of data security to a third party(a cloud data storage provider). Before taking such decisions we can also inspect privacy policies, security features, access control features of cloud data storage providers. To make the data secure on cloud we can take the following measures:
- Implementing compliance process against risk:
Verify your cloud-hosted data are secured in accordance with you secured in accordance with your security agreement also verify compliance for cloud data service provider
- Employee management on data access:
There might be a possibility that other organization’s data is also hosted by the same cloud hosting provider on the same data center. So employees of other companies should be isolated to view our sensitive data, instead only authorized users of the organizations should able to access the data hosted on a cloud
- Observing audit trails on the cloud:
This is one of the protective measures that we should audit trail logs on a regular time of interval this will help us identify if data is accessed by unauthorized user(s)
Conclusion:
Data security is highly important, and with correct security measures, data can be protected from cyber attackers. Also, there are various options to store the data where we cannot afford the cash to maintain our own data centers.
