Data security encompasses various tools, techniques and practices that work in tandem to safeguard digital information. It safeguards data from unauthorized access to, disruption, modification, or destruction, in line with the company’s risk management strategy. It’s an integral component of securing your company’s valuable assets, keeping compliance in place and ensuring that customers trust the brand.
Data security is comprised of access, confidentiality, and integrity. Security is the process of ensuring that data can only be viewed by the intended recipients. This can be achieved by encryption and types of data security secure communication channels. Integrity ensures that data remains unaltered and accurate, which can be accomplished by using data backup and validation processes. Availability means that you can ensure that the data is accessible whenever needed. This can be achieved by implementing access control policies and redundancy of data.
Many attacks are based on the capacity of attackers to gain access to sensitive information, such as medical records, intellectual properties and financial metrics that are critical to business. Strong data security protocols ensure that the information is protected from attack and allow businesses to avoid costly consequences such as ransom-paying, lost revenue from interruptions in operations or incident response costs as well as fines and legal fees.
Data security solutions include data encryption as well as enforcing principles of least privilege access (POLP), data masking and sensitive file redaction. Authentication is also an important aspect of data security which ensures that users are who they claim to be are and are not attempting to impersonate an individual or a system. This authentication can be accomplished with biometric scans and certificates, and multi-factor authentication. These tools can be combined with encryption to offer an extra layer of security.