When it comes to safeguarding sensitive information, it’s vital to be aware of the distinction between data protection, data security, and data privacy. While they may appear like they are similar, each serves a distinct purpose in your company’s overall data protection strategy. Data protection best practices help protect your company’s data from corruption, compromise and loss by creating procedures and controls that limit anchor access, monitor activity, and detect and respond to threats. Data security concerns protecting the integrity of your data and safeguarding important information from unauthorized changes while data privacy dictates who has access to your data, and what information can be shared with third party.
To manage your data security correctly, you must first conduct an audit of your business infrastructure to determine what type of data and where it originates from. This will help you map your systems and determine the policies you need to implement as well as an assessment of risk, which will assist you in deciding how to prioritize your efforts based on the most significant dangers to your data.
Once you’ve mapped your data, it’s time to establish a data classification system. This system is used to establish access controls for use and modification, and helps you meet compliance. If you’re using a role-based or access-oriented classification schema it must be consistent and easy to follow, which reduces the likelihood of human error which could cause data to be unprotected.
Additionally, you’ll need implement a comprehensive backup plan and disaster recovery plan to safeguard your data in case of a cyber-attack. This includes encryption of data when it is in transit to ensure that hackers can’t read your information. It is also important to update your disaster recovery plan and backup plan to ensure you can continue to run your business when there is cyberattack.
