- Cloud Protection
- Compliance
- Data Leak Prevention
- Bring your own device
- Copy protection
- Data access control
- Data at rest
- Data in transit
- Data in use
- Data leakage
- Data loss prevention
- Data security
- Data security breach
- Data theft
- File security
- Incident response
- Indicators of compromise
- Insider threat
- Ransomware attack
- USB blocker
- BadUSB
- USB drop attack
- Data Risk Assessment
- File Analysis
- File Audit
Data Security
What is data security?
Data security is the practice of safeguarding digital information from exposure, theft, and destruction by adopting a series of IT security policies and procedures. Those policies and procedures can include system security, device management, access control, auditing, proactive threat hunting, incident response, etc.
Why is data security important?
Organizations store and process enormous amounts of data such as financial records, intellectual property, and customers' personal data. It's vital that all this information stays secure within the organization. Lack of stringent data security measures can cause severe legal and financial ramifications, such as:
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Loss, leak, or exposure of sensitive information:
Sensitive personal data such as personally identifiable information (PII), electronic protected health information (ePHI), and payment card information (PCI) can fall into the hands of malicious actors.
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Compliance penalties:
Several regulatory bodies mandate that sensitive data be handled and stored securely, and any failure to do so will result in the organization incurring huge fines, litigation fees, prolonged forensic analysis, and damage to its reputation.
Three core components of data security
Organizations rely on three elements of data security to build their cybersecurity framework:
- Data integrity
The assurance that the information is accurate, complete, and consistent, without being compromised throughout its life cycle.
- Data confidentiality
The protection of data from authorized access, use, disclosure, or theft.
- Data availability
The certainty that all the business-critical data is available at any time for use by authorized individuals.
Types of data security measures
An effective data security management strategy ensures confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data. Some of the most common types of data security measures are:
| Data security methods | What you should do | How DataSecurity Plus helps |
|---|---|---|
| Access control | Regulate who can access what files based on their role in the organization. | Data access governance Track accesses to sensitive personal data. Detect and respond to access anomalies instantly. |
| Data auditing | Keep track of all file accesses and modifications. Ensure continuous audit trails to facilitate quick forensic investigation in case of a security breach. | File access auditing Audit all file changes made across both local and shared network drives in real time. |
| Incident response | Generate instant alerts and automate your threat response when spotting malicious file activities that might indicate potential attacks. | File integrity monitoring Stay informed of all high-risk file activities that occur by generating e-notifications instantly. Shut down infected systems, disconnect rogue user sessions, and more using preconfigured scripts. |
| Data risk assessment | Locate where sensitive personal data (PII, ePHI, and PCI) is present in your data stores and analyze its vulnerabilities. | Data risk assessment Identify files containing sensitive personal data, its owners, and the risk associated with it. |
| Malware protection | Protect your IT network assets from Trojans, worms, ransomware, malware, and other similar threats. | Ransomware detection Detect and contain potential ransomware infections instantly by shutting down infected devices, disconnecting compromised users accounts from the network, and much more to prevent devastating data loss. |
| Email security | Secure your email account and its contents from unauthorized access, misuse, and loss. | Data loss prevention Restrict the movement of business-critical data via email attachments. Use on-screen pop-ups to warn users about the risk involved in moving confidential data via email attachments. |
| Endpoint security | Protect endpoint devices so that data is not lost through end-user devices like desktops and removable storage devices. | Data leak prevention (DLP) Use predefined DLP policies to prevent unwarranted data transfers to USB devices, monitor file integrity, and more. Restrict movement of business-critical data to USBs, email (Outlook), printers, and more. |
| Data minimization | Purge redundant, outdated, and trivial (ROT) data and other junk data that is no longer in use to avoid data hoarding. | ROT data analysis Find and manage old, stale, duplicate, orphaned, and non-business files to help optimize disk usage. |
| Privilege management | Conduct routine checks to ensure the principle of least privilege is applied across your organization. | Permission analyzer Generate periodic reports on share and NTFS permissions. |
The DataSecurity Plus solution
DataSecurity Plus provides a one-stop solution for all data security needs in your organization.
Download a free, 30-day trialLooking for more information on the fundamentals of data security? Here is an infographic that you might find useful.