When it comes to safeguarding sensitive information, it’s vital to understand the distinction between data protection, data security, and data privacy. While they may sound the identical, they serve different purposes within your overall data security strategy. Data protection best practices protect your company’s information against loss, corruption and compromise through protocols and controls that restrict access to activity, monitor it, and identify and respond threats. Data security is about the integrity of data as well as protecting important information from illegal modifications, while privacy controls what data can be seen by third parties and who can access it.
To ensure your data protection correctly, you must first conduct an audit of your business infrastructure to determine the kind of data you have and where it originates from. This will enable you to identify your system’s structure and decide the policies that you should implement.
Once you’ve identified your data, it’s time for you to establish an organization for data classification. This is the basis for the creation of access controls for modification and use and helps you meet compliance requirements. It’s important to use an easy and consistent classification scheme, no matter the type of role-based or access-oriented schema. This will lower the chances of human error, which can cause data to not be secured.
It is also necessary to establish a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan that will protect your data in the event of a cyber-attack. This means encrypting your data both during its rest and in transit so that malicious actors cannot access your data. It is also important to update your disaster recovery plan and backup plan in order to ensure you can continue to run your business if there is cyberattack.
