Data Security – Overview, Threats and its Preventive Measures

What is Data Security?

We all deal with a large amount of data daily and keeping it secure is our responsibility. And this is where the term Data Security comes. So what is Data Security? The process of protecting data from unwanted access and corruption throughout its life cycle is known as Data Security. It comprises of data encryption, tokenization, hashing, and key management activities that secure data across different platforms and applications.

Why Data Security is Important?

Any company that creates, collects and stores data is a valuable asset for it. Protecting this data from corruption and illegal access by external or internal people safeguards the company from brand erosion, reputation damage, financial loss, and customer confidence disintegration. Companies across the globe have invested a lot in Information Technology cybersecurity competencies to safeguard their important data. Whether an organization is having a need to protect customer information, brand, intellectual investment or want to deliver control for critical arrangement, the mode of incident/event detection and response to defending managerial/organizational wellbeing have three common components: people, procedure, and technology.

Different Solutions to Protect Data Securely

Once you understand the importance of data security, it becomes easy for you to frame a plan to secure your data. There are numerous data security procedures and technologies that will protect your data along with maintaining your company’s productivity. Following are a few data security controls:

Authentication

Authentication, accompanied by authorization, is one of the best ways to implement data security and safeguard against data thefts. Authentication technology works on the principle of verifying if the user’s credentials match with those that are already stored in your database. The standard authentication procedure used today for identifying an authorized user includes using a combination of methods such as PINS, passwords, swipe cards, security tokens, biometrics, etc.

Access control

The process through which authentication and authorization occur is called Access Control. The systems can comprise:

• * Discretionary access control (minimum restrictive): It allows access to the resources on the basis of the identity of authorized users or groups.
• * Role-based access control: It assigns access on the basis of the organizational roles.  Permits users access to only specific information, depending on their role in the organization.
• * Mandatory access control: It allows a system administrator to strictly regulate access to complete information.

Backups & Recovery

Arranging for Data security solutions also need a plan for how to get access to your organization’s and client’s data during system failure, data corruption, disaster, data theft, and other unfortunate situations. Keeping regular backups of your data is an important task to help you with gaining access to it when needed.

A data backup involves creating a copy of data and storing the same on another system or external hard disk or in the cloud. The lost data can then be recovered by restoring it from backup.

Encryption

Using data encryption solutions improves data security effectively. It uses an algorithm (known as a cipher) and encryption key to transform normal data into encrypted cipher data. The encrypted data will be unreadable to unauthorized persons. The encrypted data can be decrypted only by the user who is having the authorized keys.

Data Masking

Data masking software hides the data by replacing/disguising alphabets and numbers with proxy characters. The data is still lying there but behind the mask. Once the authorized user receives masked data, only then the software changes it back into its original form.

Deletions & Erasure

When electronic data in no more needed, it must be cleared from the machine permanently. It can be done by erasure that overwrites the data and makes it irretrievable. Erasure is different from a deletion that only hides the data, which is easy to recover.