1-417-627-9878
As the current spate of breaches and ransomware attacks have shown us, significant data breaches can indeed be fatal to businesses. The Ponemon Institute’s Cost of Data Breach Study found that on average, the damage caused by a data breach in the USA was $8 million. Even more than the financial damage, the erosion of consumer trust is the more insidious effect of data breaches. Recent data indicates that on average 25,575 user accounts were impacted in each data incident, resulting in a lingering impact on reputation and customer trust and long-term damage to the brand and business. This can indeed prove to be costlier than financial losses the affected company has already incurred by the breach. This article will talk about the top data security solutions you can use in order to protect sensitive and valuable business information. IT Consulting St Louis is a great resource to get started on implementing these data security solutions.
What is Data Security?
Data security refers to the overall policies and procedures by which organizations can protect digital data from accidents and malicious actors both within and outside the organization. These essentially act as guidance to implement the right actions with data and information assets, so they remain protected from intentional or accidental destruction, modification, or disclosure. Data security generally involves the application of a range of techniques and technologies, including administrative controls, physical security, logical controls, organizational and industry standards, and other defensive techniques that control access to company data.
Core Elements of Data Security
There are essentially three core elements to building a robust data security approach: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. These concepts are often referred to as the CIA Triad – which often serves as a framework for ideal data security. These core elements can help you build a solid data security framework to protect your data from unauthorized access and data exfiltration. For more information and guidance on building strong security frameworks, please refer to IT Support Joplin.
- Availability
- Data that is always available and safely accessible for all current business needs.
- Confidentiality
- Organizational data can only be accessed by authorized users with the requisite user access permissions and proper credentials.
- Integrity
Top 6 Common Data Security Solutions
Data Discovery and Classification
The first step to data protection requires you to know exactly what kind of data you are storing and rank all of your data according to the level of sensitivity. This requires the use of data discovery and classification solution that is able to scan your data repositories for the types of data you consider important, based on industry standards or your custom requirements (these can include PCI DSS data, GDPR data, and IP). This tool will further sort all your data into categories and clearly label them with digital signatures that indicate their classification. This will help you streamline your efforts and prioritize the protection of data according to severity. While data classification can always be updated if it’s modified, you should also have to requisite controls in place to prevent users from falsifying classification levels.
Firewall
A firewall acts as the first line of defense for any organization’s network. This helps the network steer clear of undesirable traffic and strictly controls entry into the network with the use of specific ports. With stricter controls, firewalls may partially or completely disallow certain kinds of traffic or perform verification checks on the traffic. Firewalls can be integrated with routers or servers or installed as standalone hardware and software firewall solutions.
Backup and recovery
In the prevailing security crisis environment, cyber-attacks are no longer an ‘if’ but a ‘when’ scenario. This is why organizations must have a backup and recovery solution that can protect their data, in case it is stolen, deleted, or destroyed. Always check your backups to ensure that they remain updated and accessible. Duplicate all critical business assets to enable redundancy in case of a server failure, accidental deletion, or malicious damage to ensure seamless business continuity with quick data restoration. For the best results, consider outsourcing this to reliable Managed IT Services.
Antivirus
Reputed and reliable antivirus software is a critical security tool for businesses. The software can help you detect malicious code, and remove trojans, rootkits, and viruses that can infect your system and cause damage. Performing a system scan using the right antivirus solution is pretty much the first step in managing data security in the case of a potential breach or attack. The antivirus solution should also be able to contain the attack by putting affected files and folders in quarantine.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS)
Even though they require a fair bit of analysis and fine-tuning from data security analysts, intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) are indispensable tools in the fight against cyber attacks. These are typically used to perform deep packet inspection on network traffic and identify potentially malicious activity. With the right configuration, an IDS can evaluate system event logs, identify suspicious network activity, and raise alerts about any event that violates security settings. It can also be used to terminate sessions, but in real-life scenarios, termination is only really applicable for obvious attack patterns such as DDoS. Data security companies tend to rely heavily on these systems to both prevent and mitigate attacks.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions perform the indispensable function of real-time analysis of Privacy And Data Security logs that are recorded by network devices, servers, and software applications. These solutions aggregate and correlate all the events, and are efficient enough to remove multiple reports of the same event. The SIEM then proceeds to take action based on predefined alert and trigger criteria. They are also generally equipped with an analytics toolkit that helps you hone down only to the relevant events.
