Better Your Data Security with These Top Four Takeaways
Introduction
In this era, data is everything. Companies are doing wonders with the insights gained from analyzing data. But one big issue is securing the data. Data security is a much-discussed topic around the world. Businesses need to protect their data from unauthorized access and attacks.
Securing data in an organization really contributes to its growth. Businesses avoid costly data breaches by implementing policies for handling their data and training for employees. Through this, employees will understand the importance of proper data handling, making them more likely to manage and securely store data for future use.
In this blog, I am going to discuss:
- What is data security?
- Importance of data security
- 4 key elements of data security
- 5 ways of keeping data safe in your organization
- Some key data security features in Bold BI
What is data security?
Data security is protecting digital information from illegal access by unauthorized users, corruption, and theft of stored data. Companies need to safeguard business files, financial details, customer information, and more.
Importance of data security
The payoff for criminals successfully gaining access to a company’s sensitive information can be high, so the motivation to find ways past security measures is strong. Therefore, methods of securing data must evolve faster or smarter, and everyone in an organization needs to stay on top of it.
Let’s discuss the main reasons for data security measures:
- Maintenance of reputation
- Saves money
- Reduced threat rate
- Increased privacy
Maintenance of reputation
Data security builds a good reputation for companies and enhances their legitimacy. Companies in any industry who build reputations for strong security measures attract more customers, but this is particularly true of businesses that deal with sensitive, exploitable information. A data breach at a company is a breach of your customers’ trust in you, even if the data accessed can’t do them or you any other harm. Regaining that trust can be time-consuming and costly. This can all be prevented by enhancing levels of security around data in storage and transit, protecting the confidential data of a company.
Saves money
An organization facing a data breach by malicious actors can suffer major financial damage outside of that caused by a loss of reputation. Depending on the severity and purpose of the breach, operations can come to a virtual halt. Most famously, ransomware attacks can have huge upfront costs. In less severe cases, loss or corruption of data can be mitigated by backups, but it can take a long time and a lot of manpower to sort out where this loss and corruption has occurred. Should any of your customers be harmed by information stolen from your databases, your company may face reprisal and expensive legal fees. At the end, it’s far more costly to skimp on data security than it is to start out with and maintain excellent security protocols for your day-to-day applications and overall systems.
Reduces threat rate
Poor handling of data is what makes data breaches easy for unauthorized people. Data security reduces data transfers, monitors any data leakage, and forces employees to implement strong passwords. Good security protocols include frequent data back-ups, in case hackers not only steal your data, but erase it from your servers, too. Having good data security in place makes your company a less attractive target for those seeking a way into your systems to do you harm, as the resources required to succeed may be beyond their means.
Increased privacy
Data security allows a company to enforce who gets access to what types of data. Companies can filter internal data access by employee role, increasing the privacy of data internally and providing fewer access corridors to complete data sets. Only employees who need to see confidential information will be able to do so. Also, if an employee’s device is compromised, damage is mitigated. Customers will see that, even if a hacker slips past one person’s firewall, there are still measures in place to keep their information safe and private.
4 key elements of data security
Data security is developed policy and guidelines for organizations to protect their sensitive.
These are some of the key elements of data security:
- Establish strong passwords
- Ensure accountability
- Manage company-owned devices
- Host security awareness sessions
Establish strong passwords
Implementing strong passwords in a company helps secure sensitive data. It significantly reduces the likelihood that hacking attempts of the company’s data will be successful. Managers should require employees to use complex, unique passwords for their company programs and ensure that best practices for choosing and storing those passwords are well known.
Ensure accountability
Company managers and IT personnel need to work together to ensure that data is stored securely. There need to be clear, specific responsibilities associated with different roles in the company and different kinds of data. It’s easier for employees to understand how to handle data when they know how to identify what is confidential data and what is general data; so, data that can be sent only within the company, and data that is safe outside the company.
Manage company-owned devices
Organizations should have a strategy for monitoring devices provided to their employees. This secures the devices and keeps them used properly. Schedule reminders to change passwords in company-managed programs and regularly refresh employees’ memories of security policies.
Host security awareness sessions
Explicitly educating employees on data security lets them understand both the company’s expectations and the reasons behind the security measures they’re being asked to perform. Having a dedicated time for discussing the subject, like at a security-awareness session, also gives them the opportunity to ask questions. What seems like common knowledge to your IT team might not be to nontechnical colleagues. Sessions like this increase the security savvy and therefore level of your company, reducing the chances of a data breach.
5 ways of keeping data safe in your organization
Every organization needs to keep its data protected from risk. The following are ways of doing so:
- Single registration
- Data masking
- Implementing data loss prevention software
- Data erasure
- Disk coding
Single registration
Authentication of every member of an organization with login credentials limits access to organizational resources. Single sign-on eases the burden on employees of signing into a sometimes large number of programs individually. The service provider is only given access to authorized platforms, which keeps the information being used and shared in those programs within a secure sphere. The data is only accessed by authorized users, reducing the chances of any breach of the data in the company’s primarily used apps.
Data masking
Data masking is the creation of fake data for presentation to any unauthorized user who tries to find sensitive company information. The real data is secured and can only be accessed by authorized people deliberately and when necessary.
Implementing data loss prevention
Strategies should be implemented to ensure data is not lost in the case of a breach and to limit the damage. Managers need to limit access to confidential information not just to authorized employees, but to the employees who need that specific data. There also needs to be a set protocol for data backup that keeps a copy isolated in case of a ransomware attack.
Data erasure
One way to mitigate the damage of data being stolen from a device is by not having much of it there in the first place. Once you finish using confidential data, you can overwrite it in your machine using the data erasure method, which is mostly irreversible. Only authorized personnel can access the more secure back-up data and see the original file.
Disk encryption
Disk encryption is the process of scrambling files while storing them to a format that can only be decrypted by authorized people with the right password. This serves as a content defense, protecting it from any illegal access and mishandling.
How Bold BI helps you in achieving data security
Bold BI offers security to support users’ applications. The ways in which Bold BI helps to achieve data security:
- Data is always 100% in your control
- Row-level security
- Single sign-on
- Encryption at rest
- Encrypted traffic
- Trusted authentication
Data is always 100% in your control
With Bold BI, your data is always under your control. You can host the entire product, including all data, within your private data center or your public cloud accounts with absolutely no access provided to anyone else, including Syncfusion.
Row-level security
With row-level security, you can filter rows based on filter criteria that can be tied to users or groups. This allows everyone to use the same dashboard but with unique, permission-based access to specific data sets within it for each scope.
Single sign-on
You can integrate your current security infrastructure seamlessly when using Bold BI.
Encryption at rest
Every Bold BI product installation will generate unique private keys during installation. These private keys will be used to encrypt and store sensitive data.
Encrypted traffic
Client to server, server to database and other resource access can all be configured to use SSL.
Trusted authentication
Authentication verifies user identity. Any access to any resource within the Bold BI system requires authentication. Such authentication can use built-in providers or be delegated to existing security infrastructure.
Conclusion
I hope now you have a better understanding of good practices for data security.
Bold BI helps you visualize your data to see all your important metrics and KPIs in real time. It helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. You’ll save time by avoiding redundant work. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our documentation. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ supported data sources.
You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on March 16, 2022.
