Since the advent of technology, there has been a significant shift in how we conduct business activities. Technology brought digitalization. It has also saved us from the stress that accompanies manual task execution.
As we transit to the digital space in business, we must be wary of the volume of the data we collect, with whom we share them, and how we keep them. This is because countless cyber criminals are lurking around to steal data in this age of technological advances.
Therefore, this blog post will discuss the best practices for data protection and why it is essential for your business.
Table of Contents
Best Practices for Data Protection
Data protection doesn’t happen out of the blue. Instead, it requires the use of specific tools and practices. To manage and monitor your data protection services, let us look at some of the tools and practices you can use.
Data Backup
Businesses can lose data in times of unforeseen circumstances. To avoid complete loss, you can back up your data forehand by storing them on a separate device. The data could include customer data, your company’s financial information, etc. So, after a data loss case, you can retrieve them.
While planning to back up your data, you must pay attention to certain things. They include determining which data to back up, how often to run your backup, compression type, and where to keep the device on which the backup data is.
Data Erasure
You should not confuse the data erasure process with data deletion. Data deletion makes data recoverable by cyber experts. On the contrary, data erasure is the permanent removal of unneeded data from your systems. It is a software-based process of overwriting data.
Encryption
The encryption process helps you to put sensitive information into unreadable forms. When encrypted, data becomes encoded. People can only access it with a decryption key.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
DLP is a set of tools and processes for keeping sensitive data from loss, misuse, or unauthorized access. It also guards against data damage.
The Importance of Data Protection
Data is as essential as the need for data protection measures, especially in this technological age. One might ask why that is. This subsection will answer that question.
Keeping People Safe
At times, business owners like you might think data protection only extends to their customers. This assertion is not valid. If you protect your customers’ data, you also protect those associated with them.
For instance, if cybercriminals get a hold of your customers’ data, they can launch as your customers and trick others. This case is known as identity theft.
Avoiding Financial Loss
Data protection issues can make a business to run a considerable loss. For example, when cybercriminals steal data, they ask for huge sums in cases of ransomware. Likewise, the data breach will cost you fortunes to fix.
Issues like this should awaken you that data protection does not only benefit your customers. It serves you too.
Security Intelligence says a ransomware attack costs $4.62 million on average. This sum covers notification, escalation, business loss, and response costs. It excludes the ransom paid.
So, setting up data protection management in your business will not only save you stress, it will save you money as well.
Averting Legal Issues
When things go south between two parties, one often files legal actions against the other. So, when you promise data security to your customers and fail to deliver, they could sue you. Likewise, these customers could go legal when there is a data breach in your organization and begin to experience data privacy invasion.
Involvement in legal cases over data security issues could cause existing and potential customers to lose their trust in you. So, when you maintain a robust data protection measure, this would not be the case for you.
Recovery
Even though recovery is possible after a breach, it doesn’t happen overnight. This is because data breach containment and investigation stages could take several days or weeks.
Investing in data protection tools and infrastructure will save you from operational downtime. That way, you wouldn’t have to worry about recovering from a data breach before returning to the game.
Data protection is a necessity if you collect customer data. It benefits your customers as well as your business.
Do you have any struggles with setting up your data protection tools?
