Data Protection – An Ultimate Guide

Data Protection – An Ultimate Guide

Data protection is the process and strategy that can secure the availability, privacy, and integrity of data. It is also known as information privacy and data security. A data protection strategy is crucial for every organization that collects, stores, or handles sensitive data. A powerful strategy can prevent data theft, corruption, or loss and minimize the damage caused by a data security breach.

Why Is Data Protection Essential?

Any organization that stores information like employee transaction records, bank or credit card details, email addresses, names, phone numbers, etc., must protect their data to prevent hacking, phishing, or identity theft frauds.

For instance, if hackers gain access to your customer’s bank details, they can hack into their bank accounts and steal all the money. Moreover, third parties can use their SSN or ID number to create multiple fake profiles to apply their hacking tactics without getting caught.

Data Protection Best Practices To Protect Data

When it comes to solid data protection, there are multiple management and storage options available. Solutions that help you monitor activities restrict access and respond to threats. Let’s delve into the best practices to protect data.

• Select storage that has built-in data protection features such as disk clustering and redundancy.
• Use DLP (Data Loss Prevention) tools and strategies to prevent data from being accidentally deleted, stolen, or lost.
• Use authorization and authentication controls to verify credentials and ensure that the correct user privileges are applied.
• Use firewalls to filter and monitor network traffic. Firewalls can also be used to permit specific users to transfer or access sensitive data.
• Apply endpoint protection to secure gateways to the network, including routers, ports, and connected devices. Endpoint protection software allows you to monitor and filter the network perimeter whenever needed.
• Always apply data encryption as it modifies the data according to a specific algorithm, and only the correct encryption key can decrypt (bring back the data into the original form).
• Data erasure can allow you to limits liability by deleting all unnecessary data. This can be done when data is analyzed and is no longer relevant.
• Make use of proxy servers to control the data access further. Proxy servers work as negotiators for requests from customer software seeking other server’s resources. Many organizations use these servers for performance improvement.
• Apply a correct patch management strategy to ensure all applications are up-to-date. For critical infrastructure, it’s recommended to thoroughly test the patches to ensure that no vulnerabilities are produced, and no functionalities are affected in the system.
• Install powerful antivirus on all the workstations and servers and regularly scan the incoming files to catch viruses that have slipped through like ransomware.

The Key Takeaway

It’s essential for security professionals and network administrators to use the correct policy management and keep the security tools up-to-date. While protecting the data, it’s critical not to impact the end-user functionality. Programs like threat detection systems, personal firewalls, and antivirus software drain bandwidth and processing power. Therefore, before implementing any data protection system, always check its memory utilization.