Technology is a blessing and a curse. Businesses that collect and store data often have a competitive edge in their markets and can offer a curated, white-glove experience to clients. At the same time, an inability to protect sensitive business data creates opportunities for criminals. Thus, it is critical that businesses take measures to properly protect the data they collect and store behind firewalls, security networks, and internal processes as well. Here’s a closer look at those measures.
Limit Access
The first, and perhaps most crucial, step you can take to protect sensitive business data in your organization is on the human resources level. There’s no disputing that the majority of errors that occur within any business are due to human error. This can be no less true in technology. In fact, it’s likely more. Tech is complicated! So start at home (in your business) by doing thorough background checks on all new hires.
Next, make sure you put clearance protocols into place so that only those who need access to sensitive data have it. You can segment your data through endpoint privilege management, which places an administrator or administrators in charge of who gets access to what information and under what circumstances. This approach ensures a smaller security surface area to control and more accountability for errors and breaches that do occur.
Have a Two-Step Authentication Process
While you’re focusing on your people, make sure you have strong passwords and two-step authentication in place. In the early days of the internet, everyone had cutesy email address names and fun passwords they thought no one would ever guess. And maybe they were right. But with decoding and decryption software now more sophisticated than ever, your employees need to have strong passwords they can create and store with a password manager.
Still, passwords aren’t enough anymore. Your employee might let their password slip to the wrong person, or the wrong hacker might access their information. That’s why you put two-step authentication into place. This means that even once someone enters their password, they still have to go through another step, like entering a code sent to their phone or answering a security question like the name of their first-grade teacher.
Utilize Encryption and Data Masking
Now that you’ve got your employees covered, it’s time to take a look at the actual data. Encryption is a great way to protect sensitive data because even if a hacker does get into your system, they won’t be able to understand data that’s been encrypted. Encrypted data will read like gibberish without the decryption code, which, of course, you’ll store elsewhere. To access the decryption key, you’ll need a series of numbers or a password.
Data masking, like encryption, is a way of hiding some information from hackers. What’s nice about data masking is that it creates a fake version of real data that can be confused with the real thing. You change the values or symbols of the data but keep the format. An example would be a credit card number with all but the last four digits as Xs. This shuffling around makes the data useless to a hacker.
Leverage AI for Network Security
You’ve likely already considered leveraging AI for your network security. If you haven’t, now is the time. Why? Because the hackers have. Cybercriminals are using AI to hack into data storage, to seek vulnerabilities, and to provide round-the-clock monitoring of firewalls and functions, ready to attack. There are highly specialized programmers training AI to adapt and learn how to break into the most highly secured data.
For this reason, any business with sensitive data needs to invest in AI programming that can counter the most specialized and advanced attacks. Through machine learning, AI can review the history of past internet attacks, learn from them, and arm itself to prevent future attacks. It can also implement predictive analytics and an alarm system that will recognize repeating sequences that could signal an attack. Then, it can shut down all access until a human can get involved.
Backup Data
Finally, as a first and last resort, always backup your data. Look, maybe your sensitive data never gets breached by a hacker. Instead, maybe you do have to deal with human error, the kind of error that erases all recently collected and stored data. Security breaches and data leaks happen all the time, and they’re not always nefarious. For this reason, you want to ensure you’re backing up your sensitive data at least once a day.
To get the most out of backing up your data, you should use multiple platforms and devices rather than relying on a single physical device. Store your backed-up data offsite, separate from your office building, and in a location where it will be safe from natural and man-made disasters. Unless your company is large enough and well-equipped to provide this level of security, you probably want to use backup and recovery services to backup and store your data for you.
In the end, there are many steps you can take to protect your sensitive business data, and you should probably take them all. Whether from human error, a natural disaster, or some other unexpected cause, your data can be destroyed, breached, and used against you and your customers. It’s up to you to ensure that doesn’t happen by taking every precaution possible. So your customers, and everyone else, can have continued faith in technology to do more good than harm.