Data Protection and privacy is the entire strategy, processes and solutions an organization puts in place to identify and safeguard sensitive information and to ensure that it is being managed in compliance with data privacy regulations.
This is a critical strategy for any business because security breaches, data theft, and non-compliance can have a devastating effect on business outcomes.
Security breaches are incredibly damaging. Breaches lead to a damaged brand reputation, a loss of customer confidence, increased costs, a decrease in employee productivity, as well as fines from regulatory bodies for falling foul of data privacy regulations.
In fact, in its yearly Cost of a Data Breach Report, IBM found that the average cost of a data breach across the world increased nearly 13 percent over the past two years, with the global average cost of a data breach between March 2021-March 2022 hitting a record of $4.35 million (US).
Read the blog: What is the Impact of Data Loss on Your Business?
To improve data protection, as well as demonstrate a resilient data protection and privacy strategy to regulatory bodies, organizations must do all they can to minimize the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive data.
To achieve that, technology is key to every data protection and privacy strategy. That’s why, in this blog, we take a look at some of the most important tools your organization should implement to enhance its data protection strategy.
1. Data discovery
When it comes to data protection, your business just simply cannot protect what it can’t see. That’s why it’s critical to invest in a data discovery tool that gives you complete visibility into where your data lives across your network, how it is being used, and who has access to it.
A data discovery software platform works by scanning your entire environment - including your network, servers, cloud applications and hardware - to find and identify where structured and unstructured data resides across your business. By doing this, data discovery gives your business the visibility it needs to identify, classify and track sensitive data so that you can prioritize your data protection strategy based on risk, as well as ensure sensitive data is being managed in compliance with data privacy regulations.
Read our Data Protection Solutions Guide to learn more about how you can improve your business's security strategy.
2. Automated data classification
Businesses today operate in a sea of data. That data can quickly become lost, hidden and duplicated when it is not classified correctly. Data classification, however, is the process of classifying an organization’s data based on a set of clearly defined characteristics, allowing the business to separate data by how it’s being used, its content, or the requirements it needs to comply with data privacy regulations.
Automated data classification software can do the heavy lifting for you. The software will run in real time in the background of your network, identifying sensitive data and automatically implementing your classification policy where required. This frees up your IT or security team to work on higher-value tasks that further enhance your data protection strategy.
3. Encryption
Sensitive data should be made difficult for intruders to find and access. Encryption software can be used to alter data content so that it cannot be seen by unauthorized users. Encrypted data can only be accessed by those with the right encryption key.
The use of encryption software can help protect your company’s data from unauthorized access, even if the data is stolen, by making it unreadable to anyone that doesn’t have the encryption key.
4. Firewalls
Firewalls are a data security tool that enable you to monitor and filter traffic to your network. Firewalls can be used by your business to better ensure that only authorized users are able to access and transfer sensitive information on your network.
5. Data backup and disaster recovery
Data protection is all about mitigating the risk of losing sensitive data, but it’s not possible to eliminate the risk of data loss altogether. That’s why it’s critical to have data backup and disaster recovery technologies in place, just in case the worst case scenario does happen.
Data backups will create copies of data and store them separately so that your business can restore data in the event of a loss of modification, while disaster recovery, in most cases, involves the setting up of a remote disaster recovery site that your business can switch it operations to in the event of a disaster that results in data loss.
Are you interested in learning more about how you can enhance your data protection and privacy strategy? Book a demo of the Cavelo platform today, and learn how we can help simplify your data protection and attack surface management.
