Data security refers to protective digital privacy measures that are applied to prevent unauthorized access to computers, databases and websites. Data security also protects data from corruption. Data security is an essential aspect of IT for organizations of every size and type.
5 Ways to Enhance Data Security
Limit Data Access
Most of the organizations give privileged access to their sensitive data to a number of employees and insiders. Think about who in your organization has access to sensitive customer data? Can you identify everyone’s access rights? Most company executives are unaware of the details about individual employees who have access to data and why they access it. This is a huge risk to data loss, theft and hacking.
This means it is necessary for businesses to limit the data access. Organization’s should determine what an employee needs access to and ensure they have access to only what they need. Not anything else. These all limitations could help organizations to manage their data more efficiently and ensure it is being safeguarded from theft or loss.
Identify Sensitive Data
For companies, it is important to be aware of where their most important data and sensitive business information lies. This will ensure you have the right information and allocate more resources to protecting your most sensitive and crucial assets.
Pre-Planned Data Security Policy
When looking at the operations and processes needed to mitigate a cyber-attack, an important step is to prepare a list of security measures and data security policies. This sort of plan by an organization could help significantly in critical situation and times of incident response. Through policies, you can immediately react in order to prevent extreme impacts of a cyber-attack.
As with access management and rights, employee access could be identified easily and you would remain aware of which users in your organization could have potentially been breached. It is important to remember that a policy and process plan is only as good as its last revision. Technology, industry regulation and best practice is always changing. Someone therefore needs to own this policy and process guide and always look at new ways of updating it to keep it relevant.
Strong and Different Passwords for Every Department
Sensitive data in an organization should be locked away with strong passwords. making stronger passwords is necessary for fighting a number of password hacking tools that are easy to get on the market. Try ensuring that there are a combination of different characters including alphabets, numbers, symbols and other capital letters.
Additionally, using the same passwords for different programs and access is also a risk. Once your password is cracked, a hacker will try the same password on all major accounts you own.
Therefore, organizations should keep unique passwords for all employees as well as the departments. This can be easily managed using a password manager tool and ensuring that all employees receive proper data security training and password tips.
Where possible, it is also advised that multi-factor authentication is used. Adding another step to a password login means another step that hackers need to crack, making the hack much more unlikely and difficult. Some good examples of multi-factor authentication include biometrics, push notifications to phones, smartcards and token authentication.
Regular Data Backup and Update
Last on the list of important data security measures is having regular security checks and data backups. For an unexpected attack or data breach, it is helpful to have an organization back up their data. To have a successful business, you must keep a habit of automatic or manual data backup on a weekly or daily basis.
In addition, the data should be protected through updated software and efficient antivirus tools. However, to attain this, you must have progressive and efficient IT department. Make sure you are hiring someone with the right skills who you can trust to do the job properly.
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