Data security is the controls, policies, and procedures that have been applied to secure personal data stored within the company and safeguard it against security incidents and data breaches.
What is a security incident?
A security incident can happen because of the failure of any technical or organizational measures taken by your business. For instance, failure of the firewall, error in the access and role concept, lack of password protection, malware access, data leakage, or breach of internal security regulations. A security incident can be technical or physical, or both.
What is a data breach?
A data breach is a security incident that has resulted in any accidental or unlawful destruction, alteration, loss, disclosure of, or access to personal information. It can be accidental or deliberate data loss and may lead to considerable harm to the data subject, covering emotional distress.
Why Is Data Security Important?
Information protection
The most significant purpose of data security technologies is to protect personal information. Such sensitive data like health information can have a tangible adverse effect on the data subject if it’s breached, and thereby, it merits additional protection.
Reputation improvement
Companies that are known to secure their data and have efficient security controls in place can have confidence among their stakeholders. Most firms want to express themselves as socially responsible organizations in the international market so that they can attract investors and business partners effectively. Hence, a business’s reputation is essential for long-term development. And building strong data security will help organizations win customer trust and gain reputation in the world’s market.
Cost-saving
A company can save a lot of money arising from a data breach if robust security controls are applied at an early stage.
Compliance standards
Organizations now need to ensure they are securing their data to keep compliance with national and international regulations, including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
4 Types of Data Security
Data masking
Data masking means creating a fake but still realistic version of your data. Thanks to that, companies can use data masking for user training, developing or testing applications, and sales demo and still be able to protect sensitive data.
Encryption
Encryption is a way to convert data and information into secret codes. Only authorized users with the encryption keys can read the data. Database encryption solutions work like a defense for storing sensitive data by obscuring it with encryption or tokenization.
Data resiliency
Data resiliency refers to the ability of a company to recover from any failure or problem, for example sudden power shortage that shuts down systems or hardware malfunction. It’s important for companies to recover quickly to reduce the impact.
Data erasure
Data erasure is often understood as data wiping and data clearing, data analytics companies usa but more than just deleting data, data erasure employs software to overwrite data completely. This ensures that others cannot recover that data.