Security breaches happen regularly, and these attacks highlight the vulnerability of data and the lack of solid security strategies among organizations. Your data security is crucial to your business’s overall well-being.
Data protection strategies are usually multi-step processes that let you define what particular security measures should be implemented and maintained. It prevents threats from unauthorized sources from accessing that data.
Having a plan keeps you better prepared for the future. However, if that plan should provide you with the best possible benefit, it should be implemented correctly.
With that in mind, here are some steps that you need to implement to have a more effective enterprise data security strategy:
1. Do an audit
Before you look for any new data protection approach, you must thoroughly audit your security systems. This allows you to find any vulnerabilities. It is essential before you can adopt a clean sheet strategy to your database access, workstations, etc.
Modern encryption is also highly effective, so ensure all your data is encrypted at the earliest possible point in the cycle.
Also, based on your audit, your team has likely collected some findings and may want to consider ways your tech stack could be improved. Are you getting the most out of these security investments? Are these tools helping your security teams, or do they give them more work?
2. Classify sensitive data
Classifying sensitive data is an integral element if you want to achieve data privacy.
When doing this task, you need to know data confidentiality levels, identify and classify sensitive data, know where it’s located, and know data access models.
3. Figure out data lifecycle
You must understand the data lifecycle to protect your business’s sensitive or crucial data. It involves creating, archiving, using, storing, and sharing. Knowing the stage of every piece of data will allow you to know which policies and tools you need to implement to protect it during each point of its lifecycle.
Data lifecycle management secures and protects your data over its full use. It gradually evolves with the document from when it’s created to when it’s disposed of.
It then analyzes, investigates, and interrogates the data and looks for value. It then identifies which sensitive, and low-value data are.
4. Know the data security policy of your organization
This acts as a framework your security team goes with. This policy should build accountability in your security team and streamline the flow of information and tasks.
You need to consider if you want to define the policy of your organization’s policy to ensure that it aligns with your company’s overall business goals.
For instance, if one of your goals is to work more efficiently, then you should use different tools and processes that allow you to move more quickly.
5. Educate your employees
It’s also essential to have cross-team alignment, where everyone in your organization knows what’s going on and why. Ideally, a data security policy should be easy to understand in all departments in your company, not just the IT department.
While a deeper understanding of data security isn’t necessary for all the members of your organization, your employees should know the types of information they consider confidential.
They should also know about any potential leaks and breaches and simple ways to prevent data loss. Giving them refreshing courses quarterly or annually can go a long way.
Moreover, everyone with a username or password should be responsible for securing data. IT admins should remind employees and managers that they shouldn’t log information with any outside party. Data security should be everyone’s job. Thus, it shouldn’t be limited to only a handful of employees in the IT team.
If everyone in your organization has security and a more privacy-forward mentality, you can easily mitigate these potential risks.
6. Improve endpoint security
Almost every organization has endpoint security. However, preventing ransomware, static detection, and antivirus is no longer enough.
You need advanced features in your endpoint protection and do endpoint management and hygiene from a centralized management system.
Excellent endpoint security should include several behavioral detection engines, such as AI and machine learning to enhance analysis and detection. It’s also vital to have exploit protection, access control, device control, application control, and vulnerability.
7. Monitor your entire system and its assets routinely
Do you see those little reminders, software notices, and updates on your screen? If so, don’t ignore them. If you’re not paying attention, you could miss out on a critical security update or clue that could lead to a potential security breach.
You won’t know what has been compromised until the damage is already there if you don’t monitor the entire system regularly. It also helps to have excellent software support to reduce risks and optimize value.
Here are some tips on how you can use routinely monitor your entire system and its assets:
- Ensure that all software is up to date
- Do regular backups of your important data
- Do have a cloud-based disaster recovery in place
- Make sure that you utilize a data leakage prevention software
Over to You
So, there you have it. Hopefully, the following steps will help you implement a better data security strategy.
When looking for different cybersecurity solutions, make sure to look at the pros and cons. Then, determine how these impact the security of your network, the user experience for network users, and your ability to meet the most important goals for your business. Good luck!