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What Is Data Security?

01 What Is Data Security

Data security involves protecting both digital and physical business information like employee records, transactions, customer information, and other sensitive data from unauthorized access, theft, corruption, fraud, and other scams. Data like names, contact information, bank and credit card information, and health information is sensitive to cyberattacks, so protecting your organization’s data is of utmost importance and is even legally required in many cases.

Data security solutions comprise several security efforts, including software application security, storage device and hardware protection, and policies and procedures outlining your organization’s security standards. The technologies and tools you implement as security measures should enhance your visibility into how your sensitive data is used and where it is stored. Understanding how and where your data is stored allows you to implement protections that will be most effective for your situation.

Data Security vs. Data Protection vs. Data Privacy

You may hear the terms data security, data protection, and data privacy used interchangeably. While they’re closely related and often overlap, there are differences to be aware of. Take a closer look at these concepts to understand how they differ:

  • Data security defends against internal, external, accidental, and malicious threats: Data security involves the specific measures taken toward preventing cyberattacks.
  • Data protection safeguards against loss, corruption, and compromised information: Data protection focuses on data recovery and backup, ensuring the data can be retrieved if it’s overwritten, corrupted, or deleted.
  • Data privacy determines who has access to data and prevents unauthorized access to the data: Data privacy involves deciding what third parties can access data and what mechanisms will be put in place to prevent unauthorized users from reading the data.

02 Build Your Reputation

Why Is Data Security Important?

Your data is a crucial aspect of your company or organization, and unfortunately, your data faces numerous risks, including cybercriminal activities, human errors, and insider threats. Data security is essential for ensuring your data stays yours. In addition to keeping your digital data private, data security can improve your company or organization’s reputation and ensure you’re meeting compliance standards.

When your organization is known for protecting both your and your clients’ data, your clients will trust you and your efforts to protect your information. Projecting yourself as a responsible partner helps build your reputation and attract bigger and better business partners and clients.

When working with and storing sensitive data, there are several industry, national and global standards and regulations for data protection, security, and privacy. For example, nonfederal organizations storing Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) must adhere to specific data security regulations and protocols. The healthcare industry also has several privacy laws, and data security can help healthcare organizations comply with these laws.

What Is Data Governance?

Data governance is an essential part of data security for any business or organization. Data governance organizes and sets up the collection of policies and standards that outline what to do in specific situations, how to handle the data, and who is allowed to do what. Specifically defining what data needs to be secured, how it should be protected, and who is responsible and accountable ensures your policies are standardized and understood across your organization.

Defining policies and roles also helps maintain the security and quality of your data. You’ll be more prepared in the event of a security breach if everyone knows their role and how to handle the situation.

What Are Security Controls for Data?

Security controls for data are the tools and technologies you use to enforce your data security strategy. Your controls will help detect, avoid, or minimize security risks to your data. Security controls are essential to counteracting unauthorized access to data and deterring potential malicious attacks on your data systems. Depending on your needs, you could implement several types of security controls. Here are a few of the most common security controls for data:

  • Data encryption: Encryption software uses an algorithm that makes data unreadable unless an authorized user decrypts it. Data encryption makes data useless to unauthorized users who breach your system.
  • Data resilience: Data resilience controls create copies of your data to back it up if a security breach or accidental loss occurs.
  • Data masking: Another form of data encryption, masking blocks letters and numbers in your data sets with proxy characters so unauthorized users cannot read the data.
  • Data erasure: When data is no longer needed in your system, use data erasure to clear the data. Without data to breach, you reduce your liability.

How to Implement Security Controls for Data

Whether you’re integrating data security into existing applications and systems or want to ensure your newly developed applications remain secure, proper implementation is vital to the success of your security controls. For example, if you’re in the development stages of new software for your organization, you may consider how DevSecOps can help you identify potential vulnerabilities early in development. This helps implementation go smoothly and keeps data more secure.

You can take a few general steps when setting up data security measures in your systems and applications. Here are a few data security tips to ensure you implement your security controls:

Identify Sensitive Data

In many cases, your data will have different levels of sensitivity. When implementing security controls, you need to identify areas of high sensitivity. Highly sensitive data is at a higher risk of attack. Even a small breach of sensitive data can have significant consequences, so these areas must have proper security controls.

Create a Data Usage or Governance Policy

A crucial aspect of implementing security controls is creating a data governance policy. Your security measures will be ineffective if your organization lacks designated individuals to maintain, analyze, and manage your data security. Data governance prepares you and your team for data security risks.

Control Access to Sensitive Data

One of the most effective ways to keep data secure is to identify the individuals who need access to the data and restrict access to those individuals only. These people should be authorized with credentials and permissions, and your data should only be accessible with credentials. Controlling access to your data helps reduce the risk of a breach.

03 Ensure Your Data Security

Ensure Your Data Security Is Compliant With BTI

Whether you work in governmenthealthcareinformation technologies, or another industry that handles sensitive data, complying with data security regulations is necessary. Compliance consulting and training from a professional like Business Transformation Institute, Inc. can help ensure you’re on the right security track.

Contact BTI to learn about our compliance services and DevSecOps certifications.

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