Data breaches, ransomware, and other types of cyber incidents are on the rise. All types of organizations are vulnerable, from the smallest business to the largest enterprise. Given that large enterprises are especially appealing to financially motivated cyber criminals, what data security strategies are you using to protect your enterprise?
Why Your Enterprise Needs Data Security Strategies
Data security is essential to every enterprise. Your business holds volumes of valuable data that malicious actors would love to get their hands on – or hold hostage until you pay them a hefty ransom. The threats are large and growing.
Consider the following:
- The number of successful cyberattacks increased 5.5% from 2019 to 2020 (CyberEdge 2021 Cyberthreat Defense Report)
- The average cost of a data breach increased 10% from 2019 to 2020 (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021)
- 42% of enterprises with 1,001-5,000 employees were victims of ransomware in 2020 (Sophos The State of Ransomware 2021)
- More than 80% of all cyber incidents are conducted by organized criminal groups (Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report)
Key Data Security Strategies for Your Enterprise
To protect against these cyber threats, your enterprise needs a set of robust data security strategies. Here are seven essential strategies to employ.
Data Lifecycle Management Strategies
Key to any enterprise’s data security is a robust data lifecycle management strategy. Data lifecycle management involves management of data throughout its entire lifecycle, including:
- Data creation
- Data storage
- Data access
- Data deletion
To best protect your data, your enterprise needs standardized processes, procedures, and policies to ensure that it is managed in a consistent and secure fashion. Lack of such data management processes can expose your data to unauthorized access and other unwanted cyber events.
Data Protection Strategies
It’s essential that you develop a strategy for how to protect your valuable enterprise data from data breaches and types of unwanted cyber events. This strategy should include strategies for:
- How your data is stored
- How it is secured from breach or attack
- Who can access the data
- What you should do in the event of an event
Your data protection strategies may involve encrypting your stored data and employing firewalls, antimalware software, and other data protection tools.
Data Storage Strategies
Your data storage strategies should define not just where your data is stored but how that storage is secured from breaches and other incidents. You need to be able to securely move data into your designated storage, either on-premises or in the cloud – and then protect the data while it’s being stored.
Data Access Strategies
Wherever your data is stored, your employees need to access it. It’s important to strategize just who can access what data and how. This includes employees working remotely who must access files over often-nonsecure Wi-Fi connections. You’ll need to develop strategies for remote access, user authentication, secure login, and more.
Backup and Recovery Strategies
In the event of a ransomware incident or other unwanted event, you need to be able to recover any lost or stolen data. This necessitates establishing data backup and recovery strategies. You need to specify:
- What data should be backed up
- How often data should be backed up
- Where backups should be stored (onsite, offsite, in the cloud, or some combination)
Your strategies also need to specify how backed up data can be restored and who’s responsible for that.
Compliance Strategies
In addition to data protection, data security needs to include strategies for regulatory compliance. Enterprises today are subject to a variety of governmental and industry regulations, especially concerning data privacy. These include the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other similar legislation. Any strategy to secure your data must be compliant with all applicable standards and regulations.
Defense in Depth Strategies
For the ultimate in data security, consider employing a defense in depth (DiD) strategy. This is an approach to security, based on military strategies, that makes use of multiple defense layers to repel cyber attacks. While any individual layer can serve to discourage or slow down an attack, the use of multiple layers is designed to prevent an attack entirely.
A DiD strategy is both defensive and offensive. It employs both physical and technical methods to:
- Test for vulnerabilities
- Avert breaches attacks
- Detect any attacks that make it through the defenses
By nature, DiD strategies result in redundancies between the defense deployed. It’s these redundancies that provide the robust barrier to keep malicious actors out – and your enterprise data secure.
Turn to Wickr to Protect Your Enterprise Communications and Collaborations
There’s another data security strategy your enterprise needs – to secure your communications and collaborations. Wickr offers a secure communications and collaboration platform that uses end-to-end encryption and military-grade technologies to protect all of your enterprise text, voice, and video messages and conferences. It uses the same encryption technology to protect files shared during team collaboration – especially useful for securing your remote employees. Make Wickr part of your overall data security strategy today!
Contact us today to learn more about enhancing your secure communication strategy.