What is Data Security?

Data Security Meaning And Definition

Data security involves protecting data from corruption, loss, theft, or unauthorized use throughout its lifespan. It covers everything—hardware, software, storage devices, and user devices; access and administrative controls; and organizations’ policies and procedures.

Data security is enhanced through the use of tools and technologies that increase visibility of a company’s data and how it’s being used. These tools can safeguard data by implementing data masking, encryption, and the masking of sensitive information. It also enables organizations to simplify their auditing processes and meet the growing data protection standards.

A strong data security management and strategy process allows an organisation to safeguard its data from cyberattacks. It also aids them significantly reduce the danger of human error and insider threats, which are responsible for many data breaches. 

Why is Data Security Important?

Organizations across all industries and around the world have various reasons for the need of data security. Organizations have a legal duty to ensure that customers and users’ data is not lost or stolen, or misappropriated. Industry and state laws and regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), specify what companies are legally required to do to protect data.

Another important factor in mitigating reputational damage from a data breach is data cybersecurity. A large-scale data breach or breach of data could lead to a loss of trust among customers and the opportunity to lose business to another organization. This can also mean a significant loss of funds, fines, legal fees, and the costs of repair for any damage caused by the loss of sensitive data.

The Advantages of Information Security

• Data security: What is it?What is data security? While data security is easier to define by what it does offer below, there are also ways to define the security of data through what it does not offer.
• Ensures the safety of your information: With this mindset and using the appropriate set of tools, you will ensure that sensitive data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands. Examples of sensitive data include customer payment data, hospital records, identification data and others. Your data remains secure with the use of a data security program tailored to your organization’s needs.
• Supports a clean reputation: When they conduct business with your organization, they entrust you with their sensitive data, and a data security strategy can help you protect their data. Your reward? An excellent client, partner and business reputation.
• Helps you gain the advantage: Many industries have faced data breaches, and if you are able to keep data safe, then you have a competitive advantage, and your competitors may be having trouble keeping data safe.
• Reduces support and development costs: By integrating data security considerations into the development process, you could save on resources being spent on designing and deploying patches or on coding issues in the future.

Data Security vs Data Privacy

Data security is different from data privacy; both are to protect data. Data security entails controlling access to data using stark, black-and-white terms. For example, a data security policy may dictate that no one other than someone troubleshooting a database issue is allowed to see customer payment information—period. That way, you’ll have less of a risk of having your data compromised.

Data privacy, meanwhile, is more nuanced and strategic – decisions about who has access to specific types of data. Using the same example, another organization may say, “Well, it may help the development team to know if a lot of customers have been paying using PayPal. Then they could decide whether it would be wise to start accepting Payoneer, Skrill, or Stripe, too. Let’s give them access to payment info for the next two weeks.”

These types of decisions are more within the realm of data privacy when it comes to security of data in the cloud or on premise.

Best Practices For Ensuring Data Security And Privacy

Why should data security be of importance? First of all, it helps to ensure security for your information, and also increases trust in your customers. Some good practice that has worked for other organisations are:

Protect your data: This involves control of access and encryption of data. It must be accessible only to those who have a need for it to perform essential functions and information should be encrypted both as it moves from the database to their computer and as it moves from their computer to the database.

To be proactive about threats: Work out in advance what you will do if a data security incident occurs, by preparing a system test, educating your employees, making an incident management plan, and developing a data recovery plan.

Remove unused data: Remove digital and physical copies of data that is not needed. This way, there is less risk of a hacker finding it and profiting from it for themselves.

Types Of Data Security

There are many kinds of data security that can be utilized to protect data, devices, networks, systems and users. Some of the most common types of data security, which organizations should look to combine to ensure they have the best possible strategy, include:

Encryption

Data encryption is scrambling data with an algorithm and concealing its meaning. Encryption is the process of converting information into a code that only the person who encrypts it with the proper key can decrypt. That’s really important to keep in mind, particularly in case of a data breach, where if an attacker does gain access to the data, he or she can’t read it without the decryption key. 

Another example of data encryption is the use of solutions such as tokenization, which can do this while the data is traversing an organization’s full range of IT infrastructure.

Data erasure

Occasionally, an organization may no longer need data and require it to be permanently deleted from their system. Data erasure is one of the best data security management practices to eliminate liability and the likelihood of a data breach.

Data masking

Data masking is a method of hiding data by obscuring and replacing the individual characters of data, be it a letter or a number. This process is an encryption method that makes the data useless if someone is able to hack into it. The original message can only be uncovered by someone who has the code to decrypt or replace the masked characters.

Data resiliency

To reduce the chance of unintentional data loss or destruction, organizations can create backups or copies of their data. Data backups are crucial for the security and availability of data. This is especially crucial in the event of a data breach or ransomware attack, which will allow the organization to roll back to a previous backup point.

Biggest Data Security Risks

Security threats are become more complex for organizations today, leaving attackers with more advanced tools to attack. The following are some of the biggest threats to data security:

Accidental data exposure

Most data breaches are not due to hacking, but because employees unknowingly or carelessly reveal sensitive information. Employees can very quickly lose the data, share it with the wrong individual, mishandle it or lose it simply because they don’t know what their company has in place in terms of data security.

Phishing attacks

A phishing attack is a message from a cyber criminal that is sent using a short message service (SMS), instant messaging services or e-mail, and pretends to come from a trusted source. Malicious messages contain links or attachments that infect the recipient with malware or direct them to a spoofed site, where the malicious person can obtain the recipient’s login details or financial information. 

These attacks have the capacity to also compromise users’ devices or to enable an attacker to gain entry into corporate networks. Phishing attacks are often paired with social engineering, which hackers use to manipulate victims into giving up sensitive information or login credentials to privileged accounts.

Insider threats

One of the biggest data security threats to any organization is its own employees. Insider threats are people who knowingly or unknowingly expose their organization’s data. They are available in three different varieties:

• Compromised insider: The employee is unaware that their account or credentials have been compromised. An attacker can perform malicious activity posing as the user.
• Malicious insider: An employee who deliberately tries to steal data from their company or do harm for their own benefit.
• Nonmalicious insider: An employee who causes harm inadvertently, because of negligent activity, failure to adhere to the security policies or procedures or lack of knowledge.

Malware

There are two main ways that malicious software is normally disseminated: via email and web attacks. Attackers exploit vulnerabilities in the software used by a computer or corporate network, such as a web browser or web application, to infect the computer by sending malware. Malware can cause serious data security events such as data theft, data extortion and network damage.

Ransomware

Ransomware attacks can be a major threat to the data security of companies of any size. A type of malicious software designed to attack computer systems and encrypt files on computers. The attackers then ask a ransom fee from their victim, promising to return or restore the data if the ransom is paid. These ransomware versions have the ability to breach entire networks, even backup data servers, and to spread quickly.

Cloud data storage

More and more organizations are shifting to the cloud, and are “cloud-first” to make sharing and collaboration easier. But moving data to the cloud can make controlling and protecting it against data loss more difficult. The cloud plays a key role in remote working processes: users access information via their own devices and on less secure networks. This can make data very easy to unwittingly or intentionally disclose to unauthorized users.

Critical Data Security Solutions

A variety of solutions are available that can help organisations to secure information and users. These include: 

Access controls

Access controls allow organizations to implement policies for the access of data and systems in digital environments. This is achieved by using access control lists (ACLs) which filter access to directories, files and networks and determine who can access what information and systems.

Cloud data security

As organizations increasingly move their data to the cloud, they need a solution that enables them to:

• Ensure Data in Transit to the Cloud is secured
• Protect cloud-based applications
• This is even more important to ensure dynamic working processes when employees are increasingly at home.

Data loss prevention

Data loss prevention (DLP) enables organizations to detect and prevent potential data breaches. It also aids in identifying data exfiltration, unauthorized sharing beyond the organization, improved visibility of information, and preventing the destruction of sensitive data and meeting data regulations compliance.

Email security

Email security tools are used to identify and block email-based security attacks. This is crucial in preventing employees from clicking on malicious links, opening malicious attachments and visiting spoofed websites. End-to-end encryption on email and mobile messaging is another feature email security solutions can offer, that helps to keep data secure.

In addition to these solutions, there are AI security strategies that organizations are taking to enhance threat detection and response capabilities.

Key management

Key management is a term used to describe how cryptographic keys are used to encrypt data. Public and private keys are used to encrypt then decrypt data, which enables secure data sharing. Another possible use of hashing is to convert any string of characters to some other value, without using keys.

Data Security Regulations

Data security lets organizations meet industry and state regulations such as:

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

GDPR legislation is a law that safeguards personal data of European citizens. Its goal is to help people gain more control and privacy over their information and imposes heavy restrictions on what organizations can do with it. GDPR helps organisations to process personal data securely and ensure that it cannot be unnecessarily processed, lost, damaged or destroyed. It also attracts fines that are 4% of a company’s turnover or EU20 million, whichever is greater.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The CCPA is designed to provide consumers with increased rights and control over the collection of their personal information by businesses. This means that a business must provide you with information regarding what information it has, how it is shared or used, the right to delete that information, the right to opt-out of that data being sold to third parties, and the right to prevent discrimination when exercising these CCPA rights. Consumers have to be notified of privacy practices by organizations.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

HIPAA is a federal statute that provides privacy safeguards for patients’ health information from disclosure without their knowledge or permission. HIPAA has a privacy rule, and it’s that rule that will cover the disclosure and use of patient information and the protection of data. It also contains a security rule to safeguard all individually identifiable health information created, maintained, received or transmitted electronically by an organization. 

Fines of up to $50,000 per incident, a maximum of $1.5 million per year and a fine of up to 10 years imprisonment for compliance failure.

Learn More About Healthcare Data Security 

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act

Sarbanes-Oxley is a federal act that offers auditing and financial policies for public organizations. The regulation is designed to safeguard all employees, shareholders and the public from accounting errors and fraudulent financial activity. The primary purpose of the regulation is to control accounting, financial disclosure and other operations at public companies. It also has guidelines for other companies, private groups and not-for-profit companies.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a standard that guarantees organizations handle credit card data securely when they are processing, storing, or transmitting it. It was initiated by companies such as American Express, Mastercard and Visa to regulate and maintain PCI security standards and improve account security during online transactions. PCI DSS  is administered and managed by the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). If this is not done, there will be a monthly fine of up to $100,000 and the suspension of card acceptance.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001

The ISO 27001 is an international standard that specifies how to establish, implement, maintain and improve an information security management system. It provides organizations with practical insight on how to develop comprehensive security policies and minimize their risks.

Data Security FAQs