It’s important to know the distinction between data protection, security and privacy when it comes to safeguarding sensitive information. Although they might sound the same, each serves distinct purposes within your overall strategy to protect your data. Data protection best practices safeguard your company’s information against corruption, compromise and loss through protocols and controls that restrict access to information, monitor activity, identify and address threats. Data security is concerned with safeguarding the integrity of your data as well as safeguarding critical information against illegitimate changes while ensuring that data privacy controls who has access to your data and what information can be shared with other parties.
To ensure that you have a proper system for data protection, start by performing a complete audit of your company’s infrastructure to determine the type and origin of data that you collect. This will enable you to create a map of your system and identify the policies you need to implement.
Once you’ve mapped your data it is time to create an organization system for classification. This is the basis for creating access controls for modification and use as well as helping to meet compliance requirements. It is important to choose a consistent and easy classification scheme, no matter whether you are using a role or access-oriented schema. This reduces the possibility of human error, which could lead to data not being secured.
You’ll also have to create a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan to protect your data in the event of a cyberattack. The encryption of data while it is at the point of transit and at rest is one method to ensure that malicious actors are unable to read your data. It is also essential to update your backup and disaster recovery plan in order to ensure that you’re able to keep running your business if there is cyberattack.