Data is the most valuable asset for any organization, regardless of size or sector. Loss or corruption of financial reports, business plans and intellectual property can bring even a global enterprise to a standstill. Moreover, a wide range of compliance regulations mandate the organization protect information in accordance with data security best practices.
This article explores why data security is a top concern for organizations today and offers solutions that can address your most pressing data security challenges.
What is data security?
Data security, or information security, is the use of various types of controls to safeguard content in both electronic and physical form. A detailed data security definition involves the three foundational principles known as the CIA triad:
- Confidentiality — Organizations need to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Security measures include access control lists (ACLs), encryption, strong password policies, multifactor authentication (MFA), configuration management, and monitoring and alerting.
- Integrity — Data needs to be safeguarded from improper erasure or modification. To verify content authenticity and secure transactions, many organizations use digital signatures.
- Availability — Information must be available when needed. For example, your financial database must be available for your accountants to process payment transactions. Availability includes data resiliency, which involves ensuring that content can be swiftly recovered in the event of a cyberattack, hardware failure or other adversity.
Why is data security important?
Ensuring the security of data is vital for a wide range of vital business goals, including the following:
- Ensuring operational continuity — Data security protection helps prevent disruptions to business operations that can result from loss of data confidentiality, integrity or availability.
- Reducing financial risk — Data breaches can have severe financial repercussions beyond business disruptions, including legal fees, compliance fines and long-term revenue losses due to damaged customer trust.
- Meeting legal and compliance obligations — Failure to comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA can result in hefty fines and lasting reputational damage.
- Protecting intellectual property (IP) — Robust data security helps organizations safeguard their financial plans, designs, trade secrets and other valuable information from falling into the wrong hands.
Which data needs protection?
Both enterprises and smaller organizations have to protect two major types of data:
- Business-critical data comprises the data assets needed to operate and sustain your company. Examples include financial plans, contracts with suppliers, inventory, and intellectual property like designs and trade secrets.
- Private information includes the company’s employee HR and payroll data, customer profiles, personal medical information, and credit or debit card data.
However, organizations cannot afford to waste resources trying to safeguard every file and folder, whether it contains critical intellectual property or just pictures from the company picnic. Rather, they need to be able to protect information assets in accordance with their importance and sensitivity.
How do organizations protect data?
Organizations must employ a range of controls to safeguard information. Common types of data security measures include:
- Authentication — Every data security system needs to ensures that individuals accessing sensitive information are who they claim to be. While passwords have long been used for authentication, organizations are adopting multifactor authentication (MFA) to thwart adversaries in possession of stolen credentials by requiring an extra form of identity verification, such as biometrics.
- Access control — Authenticated users should be able to access only the data and other IT resources they need to do their jobs. Access control lists (ACLs), role-based access control (RBAC) and privileged access management (PAM) are examples of access controls.
- Encryption — Encrypting sensitive information ensures that even if unauthorized access occurs, the data is unreadable. Encryption can secure data both in transit and at rest.
- Data erasure — When data is no longer needed, it should be deleted in way that prevents its recovery. Complete data erasure is particularly crucial when retiring or repurposing hardware.
- Data masking — Data masking conceals specific data so that databases can be used for testing, analytical or other purposes without compromising data privacy. [SO1] [SO2]
Why are organizations focusing on data security?
Data security is a top action item for many organizations today. Here are the most common challenges driving this focus on data security.
High Cost of Data Breaches
A data breach, or data leak, is a security event when critical data is accessed by or disclosed to unauthorized viewers. Data breaches can happen due to:
- Cyberattacks by external adversaries
- Data theft by internal users, such as employees, contractors or partners
- Theft or loss of devices containing protected information
- Human errors such as accidentally sending sensitive data to improper recipients
Learn more about adversary techniques for credential theft and data compromise in Netwrix Attack Catalog:
A data breach can have a significant financial impacts, including recovery and forensics costs, lost productivity, reduced revenue, legal costs, compliance fines, and lasting damage to customer trust and the organization’s reputation.
Strict Compliance Regulations and Steep Penalties
Compliance requirements are also driving high interest in stronger data security. For example, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) govern how companies may collect, store and use personally identifiable information (PII), while PCI DSS regulates the storage and transmission of payment card data.
Compliance standards are complex to implement, and failures can be expensive. GDPR fines can reach 20 million euros or 4% of a company’s global annual turnover for the preceding financial year; in addition, authorities can issue reprimands or even ban the organization from processing regulated data. Violations of PCI DSS can result in being barred from processing payment card transactions.
Meeting compliance requirements is necessary for a successful data security strategy, but checking the boxes during compliance audits is not sufficient. Regulations typically focus only on specific aspects of data security issues (such as data privacy), and real-world security threats evolve faster than legislation. Protecting sensitive data should be viewed as a long-term, ongoing commitment.
Increased IT Complexity and Rapid Adoption of Cloud Technologies
Cloud adoption has soared in recent years, especially as the pandemic forced organizations to enable employees to work from home. But cloud computing upends traditional data protection strategies, which are focused on keeping malicious intruders out of systems where sensitive data is stored. Today, data is stored in systems that are outside the traditional perimeter and can flow freely everywhere. This means that organizations need a data-centric security strategy that prioritizes their most sensitive information.
More broadly, IT environments are increasingly complex, with new technologies and methodologies constantly emerging. While advancements offer enhanced capabilities, they also introduce new vulnerabilities. Keeping up and ensuring uniform data security across the diverse IT ecosystem is a serious challenge for many organizations.
Limited Resources and Budget Constraints
Demand for experienced cybersecurity professionals has soared, resulting in a global cybersecurity skills shortage. Many organizations are struggling to balance the components of data security requirements with their limited resources and budgets.
Increasingly Sophisticated Data Security Threats
Organizations also recognize that cyber threats are rapidly evolving. Some top concerns today include:
- SQL injection — Attackers exploit vulnerabilities in web applications by injecting malicious SQL code in order to access and manipulate content in databases.
- Ransomware — Adversaries use malware to encrypt an organization’s files and demand a ransom for the decryption key (which they may or may not provide). Some ransomware actors now make a copy of the data and threaten to expose it in order to increase their chances of getting paid.
- Phishing — Cybercriminals use deceptive emails, text messages or websites to trick individuals into divulging confidential data, such as login credentials. By focusing on data security, organizations aim to educate employees, implement, and deploy proactive measures to counter phishing threats and safeguard against potential data breaches.
A Framework for Building a Solid Data Security Strategy
Organizations do not need to build a data protection strategy from scratch. Instead, they can take advantage of established tools like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). The NIST CSF comprises five major functions:
- Identify — Understand and document the cybersecurity risks to your data, systems, people and capabilities.
- Protect — Implement appropriate security controls to protect your most critical assets against cyber threats.
- Detect — Ensure you can quickly spot actions and events that could pose a risk to your data security.
- Respond — Have tested procedures ready to enable prompt response to cybersecurity incidents.
- Recover — Ensure you can quickly restore data and services impacted by a security incident.
What technologies help with data protection?
A comprehensive data security strategy requires multiple protective measures, such as:
- Data discovery and classification — Data discovery technology scans data repositories and reports on the findings so you can avoid storing sensitive data in unsecured locations where it is more likely to be compromised. Data classification is the process of labelling sensitive data with tags so you can protect data in accordance with its value and applicable regulatory requirements.
- Data encryption — Encoding critical information can make it unreadable and useless for malicious actors. Software-based data encryption is performed by a software solution to secure the digital data before it is written to the SSD. In hardware-based encryption, a separate processor is dedicated to encryption and decryption for safeguarding sensitive data on a portable device, such as a laptop or USB drive.
- Dynamic data masking (DDM) — This data security technique masks sensitive data in real time to enable it to be used without unauthorized access.
- User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) — UEBA technology is designed to spot deviations from normal activity that could indicate a threat. It is particularly helpful for detecting insider threats and hacked accounts.
- Change management and auditing — Improper changes to IT systems, whether accidental or malicious, can lead to downtime and breaches. Establishing formal change management procedures and auditing actual changes can help you detect misconfigurations promptly.
- Identity and access management (IAM) — IAM helps organizations manage both regular and privileged user accounts and control user access to data and systems.
- Backup and recovery — Organizations need to be able to restore data and operations promptly, whether a user has accidentally deleted a single file that they now urgently need, a server has failed, or a natural disaster or targeted attack has brought down the entire network. A comprehensive data backup and recovery strategy should lay out a clear set of steps for retrieving lost data and managing incident response to maximize data resiliency.
- Data loss prevention (DLP) — Data loss prevention solutions monitor and control the movement of sensitive data across networks, endpoints and cloud environments. By detecting and preventing unauthorized access, use or transfer of sensitive information, organizations can proactively safeguard against data breaches.
- Email security filtering systems — These tools filter out unwanted and dangerous messages, including phishing emails, so that users never see them and therefore cannot fall victim to them.
Steps to Strengthen Your Data Security
Taking the following steps will help you strengthen your data security:
#1. Identify data security risks.
Start by analyzing and measuring the security risks related to how your IT systems process, store and allow access to sensitive and business-critical information. In particular:
- Build a risk management strategy — Identifying, assessing and mitigating security risks is a key part of a healthy data security program, and it is also required by many compliance regulations. Instead of trying to create a risk management strategy from scratch, consider building from a risk assessment framework such as the one documented in NIST SP 800-30.
- Identify stale user accounts in your directory — It’s relatively easy for a hacker to find inactive accounts to target; a quick search on LinkedIn, for example, can reveal who’s recently left a company. Taking over a stale account is a great way for an intruder to quietly probe your network without raising any alerts. Accordingly, it’s vital to regularly identify any user accounts that have not been used recently and work with your business counterparts to see whether they can be removed. But also be sure to learn why those accounts were still active and fix the underlying processes. For instance, you may need a better process for ensuring that the IT team is notified whenever an employee leaves the company or a contractor’s project is completed.
- Find and remove unnecessary admin privileges — Very few users need administrative-level permissions, and granting anyone more rights than they need can be dangerous. For instance, users with administrative access to their computers can intentionally or unintentionally download and execute malware that could then infect many computers on your network.
- Regularly scan your environment for potentially harmful files — You should regularly scan for unauthorized executables, installers and scripts, and remove those files so no one can accidentally unleash ransomware or other malware.
- Educate users —It’s hard to overstate the importance of regular training for all users. Be sure to teach them how to recognize phishing messages, how to report them and why they need to exercise vigilance.
#2. Conduct a server inventory.
Next, make a list of all your servers, along with the purpose of each one and the data stored there. In particular, you should:
- Check your operating systems. Make sure no servers are running an operating system that is no longer supported by the vendor. Since outdated operating systems do not get security fixes, they are an attractive target for hackers looking to exploit system vulnerabilities.
- Ensure antivirus is installed and updated. Not every type of cyberattack can be blocked by antivirus software, but it is a critical first line of defense.
- Review other programs and services. Having unnecessary software on your server doesn’t just take up space; these programs are a security risk because they might have enough permissions to manipulate your sensitive data.
This inventory will help you identify and eliminate important security gaps. Remember this is not a one-time task; you have to do it regularly.
#3. Know your data.
To protect your critical data, you need to know where it is located. Use data discovery and classification technology to scan your data stores, both in the cloud and on premises, and label sensitive or regulated data by type and purpose. Then you can prioritize your data security efforts appropriately to improve data security and ensure regulatory compliance.
Also, constantly be on the lookout for sensitive data that pops up in inappropriate locations, is made available to large numbers of people or is otherwise overexposed. Promptly take action to reduce the risk of data loss and exfiltration.
#4. Establish and maintain a least-privilege model.
Restricting each user’s access permissions to just what they need to do their job is vital: It limits the damage an employee can do, either deliberately or accidentally, as well as the power of an attacker who gets control of a user account. For example, you don’t want a sales representative’s account to have access to confidential financial documents or code development repositories.
Be sure to check everyone, including admins, users, executives, contractors and partners. Repeat the review on a regular schedule, and implement processes to avoid overprovisioning. One common gap is failing to remove privileges a user no longer needs when they change roles within the organization; for instance, someone in an account management role who becomes a technical support engineer should no longer have access to billing databases with information about customers.
#5. Stay on top of suspicious activity.
It’s also critical to closely audit the activity in your IT ecosystem, including all attempts to read, modify or delete sensitive data. You need to be able to identify and assess what, where, when and how users are accessing data, including privileged users. In particular, you should:
- Look for spikes in user activity. Sudden bursts of activity are suspicious and should be investigated immediately. For example, the rapid deletion of a large number of files could very well be a ransomware attack in progress or a disgruntled employee who is planning to leave the organization.
- Watch for activity outside business hours. Users sometimes save malicious activity for outside normal business hours, when they assume no one is watching them.
How Netwrix Solutions Can Help
Netwrix offers a suite of data security solutions that empower organizations to dramatically reduce the risk of data breaches and to swiftly detect, respond to and recover from security incidents.
- Netwrix Auditor helps organizations detect security threats, ensure compliance and enhance IT team efficiency. A central platform enables auditing and reporting on many key systems, including Active Directory, Windows Server, Oracle Database and network devices. Real-time alerts on threat patterns enable quick response to malicious insiders and compromised accounts.
- Netwrix Enterprise Auditor automates the collection and analysis of the data you need to answer the most difficult questions you face in the management and security of dozens of critical IT assets, including data, directories, and systems. Enterprise Auditor contains over 40 built-in data collection modules covering both on-premises and cloud-based platforms from Operating Systems to Office 365. Leveraging an agentless architectural approach, our proprietary AnyData collector provides an easy, wizard-driven interface for configuring the application to collect exactly the data needed, enabling fast, flawless, lightest-weight possible data collection from dozens of data sources.
- Netwrix Data Classification identifies content across on-premises and cloud data stores and ensures accurate classification through advanced technologies like compound term processing and statistical analysis. Predefined classification rules simplify compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. The solution also provides automated risk remediation and detection of redundant data.
- Netwrix GroupID simplifies user and group management in Active Directory and Entra ID. Features like dynamic group membership, automated user provisioning and lifecycle enforcement enhance security by reducing manual errors and ensuring up-to-date directories.
- Netwrix Password Reset enables users to securely reset or change their passwords and unlock their accounts themselves, anytime, anywhere. It also provides password change notifications, multifactor authentication (MFA) and comprehensive auditing to enhance security while saving time and reducing IT service desk costs.
- Netwrix Privilege Secure dramatically reduces the risk of compromise or misuse of privileged accounts, including service accounts. Customers can replace risky admin accounts with just-in-time temporary accounts with just enough access for the task at hand. The solution also delivers real-time session monitoring and video recording to ensure accountability and facilitate investigations.
- Netwrix Threat Manager speeds threat detection and response with real-time alerts, automated response, deception tools, easy integration with other security technologies and machine learning (ML) capabilities.
Conclusion
Improving data security requires a multi-faceted approach that includes identifying and classifying your data, understanding and mitigating IT risks, and putting appropriate controls in place.
Consider starting from a best-practice framework like the NIST CSF, and then look for security solutions that will help you automate core processes and provide the information you need. Remember that data security is not something you achieve; it is an ongoing process.
FAQ
What is data security?
Data security involves identifying, evaluating and reducing risks related to sensitive information.
Why is data security important?
Securing data against unauthorized access, use and modification helps organizations reduce the risk of operational disruptions, financial losses, legal issues, compliance penalties and reputation damage.
What are ways to address data security?
Today, protecting sensitive information requires far more than implementing basic security technologies like an antivirus solution and a firewall. Modern strategies include identity and access management, data discovery and classification, change management, Zero Trust policy, and user and entity behavior analytics.
What are the main elements of data security?
The three basic principles known as the “CIA triad” are central to data security. They are:
- Confidentiality — Data is accessible to authorized users only.
- Integrity — Data is accurate and complete.
- Availability — Data is accessible when it is needed.
