Data protection: why is it important, and how can it be achieved? As users and customers place their trust in companies when providing information, the business must maintain this trust factor. As such, it is essential that it is handled and protected appropriately. When a brand fails to adhere to this obligation, it will tarnish its reputation and compromise its consumers’ trust.
Businesses are increasingly turning to data-protection experts to ensure that their customer’s data is protected to ensure a long-term relationship with their customers without sacrificing innovation or agility. Before you can make good on your promise to your customers that their data will be fully protected, it is imperative that you, as a brand, are aware of the different methods for categorising and protecting data, as well as the technology behind those methods. After determining your business type, you can choose the most appropriate data-protection technology based on those criteria.
Data protection is vital to business operations, development, and finances. Businesses must safeguard their data so that they do not suffer from data breaches and do not endure damage to their reputation caused by such events. Also, they can effectively meet the regulatory requirements they are required to meet.
One of the most important things you can do to keep your business as smooth as possible is to keep your company’s data safe and secure. As part of your GDPR compliance process, you need to include data protection to ensure that you comply with all of GDPR’s provisions.
GDPR imposes many requirements, but they are all rooted in one simple requirement: data security. As a result, you will have much less to worry about and can resolve all other issues much more easily. To help you stay GDPR compliant, we have compiled a list of the most common data protection methods.
Assessments of potential risks
With growing companies, there is a need to increase the level of data protection offered to the information they are storing. As a rule, sensitive data should be closely guarded, whereas low-risk data should receive less protection since it has been classified as low-risk. In general, the main reason behind performing these assessments is due to the cost-benefit since a higher level of data security is also associated with a higher cost. However, we can say that this is a useful test in determining what type of data needs to be protected more closely and if we want to improve the efficiency of the whole process of collecting, storing, and processing data.
You must consider two axes when assessing the risks associated with a data breach: the potential severity of the breach and the probability of the breach taking place in the event of a data breach. Undoubtedly, the more sensitive the data is on each of these axes, the greater the risk that will be associated with it. If you are to conduct this assessment successfully, you will probably be required to seek the help of a data protection officer (privacy officer) who will be able to offer you valuable advice in regard to the establishment of valid ground rules. There is no point in trying to do this by yourself unless you are certain that you know what you are doing and that you understand what you are doing. There is a possibility that mishandled data could be lost, and it could be tragic if it does.
Security by encryption
Throughout the process, it is important to pay particular attention to encrypting high-risk data at every stage. Throughout the process of acquiring, processing, and storing the data, the data will be encrypted throughout the process of acquisition (online cryptographic protocols), processing (full memory encryption), and finally securing data (RSA or AES) before being stored. Having well-encrypted data means that even if a security breach occurs, the data can’t be accessed by an attacker, and it cannot be recovered.
This is exactly why the GDPR explicitly mentions encryption as one of the most effective ways to protect personal data, which means that its proper use will certainly bring you favour from the regulators when it comes to data protection regulations. Even if you experience a data breach that affects encrypted data, you do not need to report it to the supervisory authorities because encrypted data is considered to be sufficiently protected if you experience a data breach that affects encrypted data.
Maintaining a backup
The purpose of backups is to prevent the loss of data that may occur as a result of either user error or technical malfunctions, which can occur from time to time. A regular data backup should be made and updated regularly to prevent data loss. If you do perform regular backups for your company, there will be an additional cost to the company, but if there is any interruption to the normal operations of your company, there will be a far greater expense.
Whenever possible, backups should be performed per the principles outlined above – low-importance data requires less frequent backups; however, high-importance data requires more frequent backups. To ensure that these backups are safe, they should be stored in a safe place, and if possible, they should also be encrypted before being stored to ensure their safety.
It is recommended that you periodically check your storage media for signs of deterioration per the manufacturer’s recommendations and ensure that you store your media in compliance with the official recommendations (think humidity, temperature, etc).
It is important to bear in mind that the point of backing up the data is to be able to restore it when needed therefore regular restore exercises is a good practice that should be made part of a standard data recovery drills.
Using data tokens
Essentially, tokenization is the process of substituting a value for a cleartext value with a random value. An important part of a secure system, or token vault, is the lookup table that maps the cleartext value to the token corresponding to it, which is kept in a secure place.
As long as the token data type and length remain the same as the cleartext value, the token lookup table becomes a key to retrieving the cleartext value from the token using the cleartext value. Unlike other data protection methods, tokenization can be reversed. It is an excellent way of protecting individual data fields in systems for transactional or analytical purposes, as it does not change the type or length of the data.
The process of destruction
You may need to destroy your data at some point in the future. Data destruction might not seem like a method to protect your data, but it is one of the best methods to do so. As a result, the data is protected against unauthorised access and recovery by this method.
By GDPR, you are required to delete the no longer necessary data, and sensitive data requires a more comprehensive method of destruction.
The issue of how to destroy a hard drive has been the subject of a lot of debate. It is the degaussing process widely used to destroy documents, while paper documents, CDs, and tape drives are generally shredded into very small pieces to be destroyed. Data destruction on-site is recommended for sensitive data, especially if the data is large.
Deleted encrypted data can be easily done by simply destroying the decryption keys, ensuring the data is unreadable for at least the next few decades. After that, it will likely cease to be useful anyway since the encryption was broken in the first place.
Outsourcing to a Data protection company
It’s worth noting that a survey by Gartner in September 2021 found that industry executives cited the lack of qualified professionals as a barrier more often than any other option—even the cost of implementation and security risks. The same survey report shows 58% of executives plan to expand investment in emerging technologies. Therefore, outsourcing can be an effective alternative due to a lack of professionals. Therefore outsourcing a company is one of the safest ways to protect your company’s data.
Making the right decision when protecting your company’s data is crucial. The importance of having someone who is an expert in protecting your company’s data becomes even more apparent as you grow as a company. One of the factors that need to be considered is the cost of the project, expert knowledge, acceptance, liability, and the availability of vast knowledge experts. While an internal employee may still have to acquire the necessary expertise, an external Data Protection team would have a good reputation and certifications.
In contrast, an internal employee must get the necessary expertise from somewhere else. By contracting with a company that is external to the organisation, the organisation’s liability can be minimised. Keeping abreast of the latest developments in data protection law will guarantee that it stays relevant to users.
Whether your business is large or small, we’d love to hear if you are ready to outsource Data protection support. With over 20 years of experience, we have helped global companies become masters of their industry.
In addition to having deep technical knowledge and an understanding of the needs of our customers, we provide a unique service. By providing exceptional customer service, we ensure that your customers receive the assistance they need, increasing the value of your organisation.
You can count on aDataTribe to provide outsourced IT services to help you get your technology right and grow if you can use our services.
Let’s talk about your IT needs; contact us today!
Reach us at info@adataTribe.com