The need for enterprise data protection is a serious company-wide discussion that needs active strategies. However, despite playing a critical role in the company’s growth, data storage constantly faces serious security risks.
Data includes all information about the company – from employee, financial, and customer records to sensitive business information.
As employees must handle data for different uses, robust security measures are necessary.
However, for protecting sensitive and important data, security policies usually allow limited access to employees. Despite this restriction, there are risks to this data. Data access control tools and strategies will help fight this risk.
Why is Data Protection Important for Businesses?
As an enterprise grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to protect data. That’s why they need a robust data protection infrastructure, security network, frameworks, technologies, and tools today.
Apart from these, data protection also ensures compliance with standard data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Without data protection and strategies, businesses may face huge financial losses. Data loss may also lead to penalties and fines.
Such issues can also affect businesses by impacting investors’ and customers’ confidence. Due to this, businesses may even lose their market standing.
Enterprises should ensure a robust and unbreakable security framework that keeps businesses from falling into threat traps.
Factors Affecting Enterprise Data Protection
Many factors affect the overall data protection strategies of a company. Security leaders should evaluate, monitor, and analyze weak points that cause data breaches.
Here are the areas that need robust security measures:
1. End Use Computing (EUC):
Numerous devices remain connected to the enterprise network, including IoT devices, sensors, wearables, software, servers, and technologies.
Connected devices in use mean applications, cloud infrastructure, mobile phones, and servers remain connected. This makes these entry points very risky to threats and hacks. Also, they constantly generate enterprise data, and that’s a bigger risk.
As earlier stated, these always remain under the threat radar, thus affecting data protection.
2. Hybrid Environment
Hybrid environments also affect the protection of data. As enterprises built cloud-based networks and servers, the risk of deadly threats and security breaches has increased.
Often, employees use public networks while working in hybrid mode, which means high risks of attacks and virus penetrations.
For such issues, security admins should build an enclosed network or promote using VPNs to employees in hybrid modes.
3. Remote Work Module
Many enterprises still work remotely or follow work-from-home policies. However, they often face data security issues even with a secured network.
Such incidents happen because of a lack of data monitoring, analysis, uncontrolled access, unauthorized usage, and permissions. These incidents enable malware attacks, impacting overall IT infrastructure.
However, CISOs should implement technologies such as AI and integrate them into security systems to mitigate them. AI-based security tools help to keep all devices, networks, and servers safe.
Enterprise Data Protection Strategies and Tools
Here are some insights into what companies can do to keep their data safe:
1. Employ Creative Options
Creative data protection for enterprises can resolve a PCI requirement, HIPPA Rule, or corporate privacy policy to encrypt particular data fields.
Data access authorization helps keep data safe, too. Then, even a compromised login will not impact sensitive information. That data will remain safe in fields that become unrecognizable to threat actors.
2. Data Discovery by Automation
Sensitive data is stored in various repositories- structured and unstructured databases, data warehouses, Big Data platforms, or the cloud.
Automation tools could help in securing data in its repositories. Data protection will lead to discovering, structuring, classifying, and monitoring information through automation.
The process also includes the identification of threat types and breach impact. CISOs should invest in automation technologies to provide around-the-clock security to enterprise data.
3. Data and file monitoring
Smart monitoring track file activities using AI tools and analyze data usage patterns. By doing this, the tools allow security teams to check all access data points, spot anomalies, and identify risks. The tools also block and alert about risks and abnormal activity patterns.
4. Vulnerability Assessment
CISOs can implement protection strategies to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations, out-of-date software, or weak passwords. Enterprise data protection practices benefit by identifying data sources at high exposure risk.
Quick Hacks to Keep Enterprise Data Protection Process Active
- Conduct a security audit
- Keep hardware and software updated
- Implement a data access control mechanism
- Streamline data backups and secure repositories
- Remove Inactive data and stale information
- Use data encryption
Also Read: Data Protection Trends Businesses Need to Know in 2023
Secure Data Inside Out
With enterprise data protection critical for enterprise businesses, CISOs must implement best security practices.
There are cutting-edge technologies available today that can help CIOs with robust data monitoring. Investing in tools that use AI, automation, and the cloud to secure data is a good decision for them.
Cloud adoption as an enterprise infrastructure has increased. Businesses today have a hybrid and remote workforce, which has blurred the lines between insider and outsider threats.
So, this requires scalable data protection solutions that protect all types of threats risky for enterprises.
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