Data Security Best Practices For Enterprise Solutions
Ensuring data security within your organization is crucial if you are to remain compliant against the increasing data security regulations, as well ensuring that you maintain a good relationship with your customers and prospects. Data security concerns the protection of data from accidental or intentional but unauthorized modification, destruction or disclosure through the use of physical security, administrative controls, logical controls, and other safeguards to limit accessibility. Protecting your customer information and ensuring full confidence in your data security measures will put you in good stead for protection against data loss and data security breaches. Data is the raw
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According to a recent Gartner report, the market for content-aware data loss prevention solutions continues to grow at more than 20 percent year over year. Yet the report also notes that many organizations are struggling to establish appropriate data protection policies and procedures for mobile devices as they interact with sensitive corporate data.
Mobile data breach
Data security failures cause significant damage to a company. The level of harm caused determines the extent of ruin. It might go as far as forcing businesses to close down. The non-compliance with regulations has made data security quite a big deal. It is the duty of a company’s information officer to ensure the privacy and security of the company’s customers’ information and, most importantly, the company’s data parse. Contrary to the public perception that hackers are the leading cause of data breaches, as they are portrayed in movies, the greatest threat (namely the way these hackers get their information) is actually the employee’s unawareness. In a recent study, it was identified that inadequate employee training and a lack of threat awareness are actually the major threat to data privacy and security.
The following are a few basic practices to ensure data security:
Limit the number of people with
data and risks will help a company to design strong policies, procedures and standards that will help to keep data secure.
Data security is the responsibility of the information system team. Three responsibilities of this team are making sure the data is accurate, protecting the data from unauthorized users, and correcting the data if it is damaged. This includes protecting the system by firewalls, gouging phishing, and protecting data from a hardware or software loss.
As such, our company’s people resources pose the greatest risk for security breach. Our way to help mitigate risk in this area is to keep communication lines open in this area and to continually mandate security knowledge training, with mandatory updates on a regular basis. When the employees are informed of company policy when facing a security matter, they are better equipped to act in the best or right way. In this way knowledge is power – or at least empowerment to act in the best interest of the company’s information security.
In today’s IT world every organization has a responsibility to protect the information and sensitive data they have. Protecting data is not only responsibility of security and IT staff but every individual is involved in protecting the information. The risks to information security are not digital only, but it involves technology, people and process that an organization may have. These threats may represent the problems that are associated to complex and expensive solution, but doing nothing about these risks is not the solution.
While there is an extensive amount of files on the Internet, not all are valuable enough to be saved. Companies have to choose what’s most important in order to save space in the cloud system they have (one of the many ways businesses and/or users have kept their documents safe and backed up just in case they were to ever lose the original location in which files were saved). Employees use mobile gadgets not only to be accessible to many things at once but to stay connected in the system that the workplace may have set in place for fluency during work hours. People have items such as phones and tablets that are also subject to hacking. Although these gadgets are very efficient, they place a huge threat to companies at
The inappropriate disclosure or misuse of sensitive information by an employee may result in financial considerations and legal consequences for an organization. “Mobile devices provide all kinds of new scenarios for business data to go missing, be shared with others, or be stolen. You need to go into BYOD thinking this way, not just for everyday activity, but also when employees move on from your organization” (Arnold, n.d.).
Friedman, J., & Hoffman, D. V. (2008). Protecting data on mobile devices: A taxonomy of security threats to mobile computing and review of applicable defenses. Information Knowledge Systems Management, 7(1, 2), 159-180.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) were established to provide a set of standards, guidelines to assist all federal agencies in executing the FISMA and to assist in managing cost-effective programs to protect organization’s information and information systems. NIST founded on March 03, 1901 and now headquartered Gaithersburg, Maryland. Founded by U.S. Congress, NIST was established to impose general measurement standards laboratory; it is a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. The fledgling agency quickly assembled standards for electricity, length and mass, temperature, light, and time, and created a system to transfer those
As technology grows and information has become a critical asset companies currently are devoted their resource and money to protect their data as important as their finance and human resource assets.
While all of these technologies have enabled exciting changes and opportunities for businesses, they have also created a unique set of challenges for business managers. Chief among all concerns about technology is the issue of information security. It seems to be almost a weekly occurrence to see a news article about yet another breach of security and loss of sensitive data. Many people will remember high profile data breaches from companies such as T.J Maxx, Boston Market, Sports Authority, and OfficeMax. In the case of T.J. Maxx, a data breach resulted in the loss of more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers. In many of these incidents, the root cause is a lack of adequate security practices within the company. The same technologies that enable managers can also be used against them. Because of this, businesses must take appropriate steps to ensure their data remains secure and their communications remain
A large amount of PII is stored in platforms utilized by universities and colleges, such as Banner Web. Bricker and Eckler (2016) stated, “Colleges and universities maintain large stores of sensitive data, including financial information and expensive research statistics, making them prime targets for hackers” (para. 2). Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are not aware of the security issues involved when using portable devices or identifying a phishing email. The most common data breaches in higher education are hacking and malware, spear phishing, and portable devices. Although social media is not a type of breach, hackers can plan a data breach by collecting personal
The analysis of 2,260 breaches and more than 100,000 incidents at 67 organizations in 82 countries shows that organizations are still failing to address basic issues and well-known attack methods. The (DBIR, 2016) shows, for example, that nearly two-thirds of confirmed data breaches involved using weak, default or stolen passwords. Also shows that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that organizations have never patched, despite patches being available for months – or even years – with the top 10 known vulnerabilities accounting for 85% of successful exploit “Organizations should be investing in training to help employees know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and
a significant amount of data security breaches are due to either employee oversight or poor business process. This presents a challenge for businesses as the solution to these problems will be far greater than simply deploying a secure content management system. Business processes will need to be examined, and probably re-engineered; personnel will need to be retrained, and a cultural change may be required within the organization. These alone are significant challenges for a business. A recent example of what is probably unintentional featured an Australian employment agency’s web site publishing “Confidential data including names, email addresses and passwords of clients” from its database on the public web site. An additional
Encryption is a method of programming data for security so that it appears to be random data. Only the people sending and receiving the information have the key to decrypt the message, which will put it back into its original form making it readable. The only people with the key are the people who are intended to read the message. Not many people know what encryption is. I took a survey of twenty students and asked two questions. The first question I asked was do you know what encryption means and the second question I asked was have you ever heard of anybody using encryption. This is a chart of the information I received:
A threat agent is the facilitator of an attack however; a threat is a constant danger to an asset.