Every modern business needs to store and manage a substantial amount of data. Whether it’s financial data, contact information, or a database of employee details and passwords.
The point is: you need to keep your data safe. But how can you keep it safe? Why should you care? To answer these questions, we’re going to explore why Data Security is crucial for any organisation’s agenda.
Firstly, what does Data Security actually entail? Data Security is underpinned by three core principles:
Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability
Essentially, all data stored and managed by your organisation must remain confidential, it must not be altered or compromised, and it must remain available and accessible for the right people. All of your data, regardless of whether it’s business-critical or private, must be managed in line with these values. Otherwise, it’s all at risk of being breached and leaked by hackers.
A data breach could have serious ramifications on you and your processes. A compromised system holds the potential to be really bad for business since it could be a GDPR breach, disclosing sensitive financial information, employee records, or early drafts of contracts (which may jeopardise relationships with clients).
Furthermore, the recent surge in remote working via cloud-hosted servers in the wake of COVID-19 means that the risk to your data has grown exponentially (find out more about cloud security here).
That means risks like malware, trojans, SQL injections, or even insider threats can pose a major hazard to your operations. Therefore, Data Security does not just encompass your IT systems; it also concerns your employees.
There is the risk of an employee, due to either negligence or ill-will, compromising sensitive information, such as login credentials, meaning now anyone can access your data and do whatever they like with it.
However, there are methods you can implement to greatly minimise the risk of your data being breached.
There are already-established tools and frameworks designed to protect your data from these dangers, so you don’t have to spend valuable time building your own system from the ground-up.
Most importantly, these systems are designed to
- Categorise your data sets
- Prioritise their protection accordingly
- Recover everything in the event of a system failure
- Respond to risks as soon as they’re detected
For example, here at CSS, our servers are equipped to automatically backup their data to a secondary server location in the event of a breach or system failure. Not to mention, the servers we use utilise a Pseudonymization procedure so sensitive data, which is already encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption, is masked by artificial fields in order to safeguard it from any potential outsider threats.
Furthermore, we review our data security measures and train our staff annually through a Cyber Essentials Plus programme to ensure security remains one of our top priorities.
With cyber security threats changing and evolving too fast for legislative bodies like GDPR to keep up with, it is crucial that your organisation’s Data Protection measures are constantly reviewed and improved upon.
Learn more about Data Security by clicking here