Data security is a broad term that covers various techniques, tools and practices that work together to safeguard digital data. It safeguards data from unauthorized access as well as disruption, modification or destruction according to the risk strategy of the company. It is an essential element of safeguarding the important assets of your company in compliance with the law, and ensuring the trust of your customers your brand.
The key elements of security of data include confidentiality, integrity and accessibility. The concept of confidentiality is to ensure that only the intended recipients can access the data. This can be accomplished by encryption and secure communication channels. Integrity ensures that data remains unaltered and accurate, which is accomplished through data backup and validation processes. Access control policies and redundancy of data aid in ensuring that data is always available.
Many attacks are based on the ability of attackers to gain access to sensitive information like medical records, intellectual property and critical financial metrics for business. Secure data security protocols can protect the information from being hacked and aid businesses in avoiding expensive consequences like ransom payments, lost revenues from interruptions in operations as well as incident response costs fines, and legal fees.
Data security solutions include encryption of data and enforcing the principle least privilege access (POLP) data masking and sensitive redaction of files. Data security also includes authentication, which confirms that users are who they claim to be and aren’t impersonating a system or a user. Biometric scans multi-factor authentication, certificates and biometric scans are the most common methods to prove the authenticity. These tools can be combined with encryption to offer an extra layer of protection.