Fatihah Ramzi, DigitalCFO Asia | 16 February 2022
Data protection is the process of preventing important data from being tampered with, compromised, or lost and is necessary when running an organization.
Thousands of employees were forced to work from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, necessitating the demand for remote data protection. Organizations need to adapt to guarantee that data is protected wherever the employees are; from the office datacentre to personal laptops. Data protection is the process of preventing important data from being tampered with, compromised, or lost.
Data protection refers to a set of techniques and procedures that a company might employ to ensure the confidentiality, accessibility, and authenticity of its data. It is also referred to as data security. Any organization that gathers, processes, or stores sensitive data must have a data protection plan. A good plan can aid in the prevention of data loss, theft, or corruption, as well as the mitigation of harm caused by a breach or disaster. With that in mind, the article will explain why data protection is vital and what you can do to keep your data well-protected.
Importance Of Data Protection
Employee records, customer details, loyalty programmes, transactions, and collection of data are all examples of significant pieces of information that businesses typically maintain. This is to avoid third parties from misusing the information for fraudulent purposes, such as phishing schemes and identity fraud. Data privacy, which is a guide for how data should be acquired or managed based on its sensitivity and value, goes hand in hand with data protection.
Personal health information and personally identifiable information, such as financial information, health records, social security or ID numbers, names, dates of birth, and contact details, are normally covered by data privacy laws. All private information that firms handle, including those of customers, stakeholders, and workers, is subject to data privacy concerns. This data is frequently crucial to corporate operations, development, and finances.
Data privacy ensures that sensitive information is only available to those who have been given permission to see it. It helps firms comply with regulatory standards by preventing criminals from using data for nefarious purposes. Data security is especially critical since the number of computer devices is growing every year, and computing is becoming increasingly complicated. Enterprise data is created by a large number of computer devices that transcend beyond the conventional boundaries of IT infrastructure. In addition, the rate of data generation is surpassing available storage.
This enormous surge, according to researchers, is due to the year-round global demand for digital services. As a result of digital growth efforts, there is more data to safeguard, particularly sensitive or highly secret data from a variety of sources. It is critical to equip your firm with high-quality data protection solutions in order to prevent cybercrime from occurring.
Solutions For Data Protection
Data protection measures are intended to keep data secure, protect privacy, and prevent data loss and corruption without exposing it to analysis and inspection. To integrate cyber defense into the workflow, there must be successful methods in place to engage people in the processes. Among the several techniques of protection are:
1) Encryption & Cryptography
The study of safeguarding communications from outside observers is known as cryptography. Encryption methods take a plaintext message and turn it into ciphertext, which is unreadable. The recipient can decrypt the message with the key, ensuring that they can read it. The effectiveness of an encryption’s unpredictability is also investigated, making it more difficult for anyone to determine the algorithm’s key or input. To improve privacy, organizations can use cryptography to create more secure and robust communications. Advances in cryptography make it more difficult to break encryptions, limiting access to secured documents, folders, and network connections to authorised personnel.
2) Data Erasure
Data erasure (also known as data clearing, data wiping, or data annihilation) is a software-based approach of overwriting data that tries to fully wipe all electronic data on a hard disk drive or other digital media by overwriting data onto all sectors of the device with zeros and ones. Erasure is more reliable than traditional data removal techniques. Data erasure techniques additionally ensure that the data is unrecoverable.
3) Access Management
Access management software is used by organizations to identify, approve, and monitor access to applications and IT systems. Access management solutions, which are frequently supplied as part of an identity and access management (IAM) solution, help to improve security and minimize risk by closely managing access to on-premises and cloud-based apps, services, and IT infrastructure. They assist in ensuring that the appropriate individuals have access to the appropriate resources at the appropriate times and for the appropriate purposes. By restricting access to digital assets, access management measures maintain data integrity. This enables for fine-grained control over which groups of people have access to systems and when they do so.
4) Endpoint Security
Endpoint security is the technique of preventing hostile entities and operations from exploiting endpoints or entry points of end-user devices such as PCs, laptops, and mobile devices. Cybersecurity risks are protected by endpoint security solutions on a network or in the cloud. Endpoint security has progressed beyond antivirus software to complete protection against complex malware and emerging zero-day threats. Endpoint access surveillance and security broadens the scope of a data protection program by encompassing all network-connected devices, regardless of location. Endpoint security is now more crucial than ever. After all, so much of the world’s interactions and businesses take place in the cloud or via personal devices in remote work settings.
Strong security measures are combined with human processes and workflows in the best data security systems. The main goal is to ensure that data security is taken into account early in the digital information life cycle. Data can only be protected to a certain extent by securing networks and devices. Because data security is everyone’s concern, it is also critical to include regular, continuous security awareness training in your data protection strategy.
