The lifeblood of the modern business is its data, yet many organisations don't take their data security seriously enough. Understanding where the risk points are and securing them from a data breach is critical from day one.
It should really go without saying that data security is a fundamental consideration for every single business.
With the number of data records lost or stolen globally since 2013 exceeding 9.7 billion, clearly that message hasn’t quite sunk in for some yet. With the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) now in full force for over two years for European companies or anyone handling European individuals’ data, the stakes for failing to adequately protect data have now got even higher.
Data security is complex. It needs to cover multiple channels to be effective and when it isn’t implemented properly with gaps left unprotected, organisations can quickly find themselves at the sharp end of a data protection breach.
The riskiest points for any business when it comes to data security are where interactions are made outside the organisation’s boundaries – namely email, web and the cloud.
For email, the issue is two-fold. Firstly, there is a high risk of data loss from employees accidentally sending information they shouldn’t over email. We’ve all seen the stories of people’s personal data being emailed to an entire contact book.
Secondly, email is an easy access point for criminals. Whether its phishing or CEO Fraud our reliance on email and trust of it is easily manipulated by hackers.
The web’s data security issues are plentiful, from the risk of malware to employees accessing dodgy websites, there’s a lot of harm a business can come to through the internet.
The cloud, meanwhile, has similar risks to emails in that employees can use cloud apps to share information, while gaps in cloud infrastructure and data centre security can be exploited by criminals. We frequently see reports of data being exposed in unprotected Amazon S3 buckets, for example.
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