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What is Data Security?
Data Security is the protection of data from intentional or unintentional destruction, modification or disclosure. The main aim of Data Security is to protect the data that businesses and organisations collects, stores, creates and transmits and the technologies they utilise to do this.
Data Encryption
In the Digital Age technologies and techniques are used to protect our information, one of these technologies is Data Encryption. Data Encryption is the process of converting information into code to prevent unauthorised access and supports the Information Security ethos of Confidentiality and Integrity of data. It is the most effective way to implement Data Security and offers the added advantage of being Compliant whether that’s for GDPR or PCI DSS requirements.
Access Control
Another technology available for Data Security is Access Control. Access Control is the mechanism that governs access to resources and the operations performed on those resources, including data and also physical resources such as computer systems. Access Control systems include the provision for identification, authentication and authorisation.
A key aspect of access control is for privileged users such as system administrators. It is a well proven area that hackers strive to gain access to a privileged user account as with these credentials the total system becomes open and the hacker has free access to any data they want. Also in today’s world of regulation it is important to restrict viewing of data to only those who need to read or edit the data. Therefore a system administrator only needs to manage the data from a point of delivery ie making sure the servers are available or by protecting the data i.e backing it up. There is normally no reason for a system administrator to need to actually read the data so access controls should be applied to ‘blind’ the administrator from reading the content. In this way the risk level of data viewing is taken away and brings the organisation in line with data privacy requirements.
The importance of Data Security
Data Security is important for any business; large or small. Protecting our information is crucial in today’s digital environment. So much is shared openly in an idea that it is safe and secure from threats either intentionally or accidental. Being prepared from the inevitable is the best way to reduce your risk from breaches, hacks, insider threat, email phishing, ransomware, spam, DDoS attacks; affecting eCommerce, even identity fraud. All of these threats are real and happening now, with an estimated cost of $6 Trillion in damages related to cyber-crime expected by 2021.
