Data is the lifeblood of any business, allowing companies to function effectively and profitably. Businesses must balance the requirement to have a lot of data and the need to protect and keep private customer data. The latter is influenced by new and evolving privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, as well as long-standing laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Securities and Exchange Commission rules for protecting financial information of shareholders and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard for data about consumer payments.
The first step in ensuring data protection is to catalog and protect all of your data. This involves identifying, categorizing and determining access levels of data by its sensitivity. It is vital to put in place policies to safeguard data whether it’s in transit or in rest. Using a tool that monitors and detects data activity and detect suspicious patterns can help you identify suspicious activities and quickly detect and eliminate vulnerabilities, such as out-of-date software and misconfigurations.
A comprehensive plan for backup and recovery that includes physical storage media will be essential. In addition, it’s essential to implement appropriate security measures such as background checks on hiring candidates and regular training for employees in place to firing employees who do not require access to critical systems. Additionally, it’s crucial to develop a disaster-recovery plan to ensure that your data is secured in the event of a natural or man-made catastrophe.
