Guide: Essential Enterprise Data Protection

Enterprise Data Security

In this chapter, we’ll provide an introduction to enterprise data security and cover the following topics: 

  1. What is Data Security?
  2. Why is Data Security Important?
  3. Types of Data Security
  4. How do you Ensure Data Security?

What is Data Security?

Data Security (sometimes referred to as Information Security) is a set of processes, standards and technologies used to ensure that (1) data is being accessed and used by authorized parties for authorized uses and (2) data integrity is maintained throughout its lifecycle. While data security is applied to all types of data, a specific emphasis is placed on sensitive data such as personal information or intellectual property.

A few examples of risks that data security frameworks aim to mitigate include:

  • Data breaches
  • Data leaks
  • Privacy violations
  • Unauthorized access to data
  • Non-compliance with security standards
  • Data loss
  • Data corruption

Data security may include a wide range of processes, activities and technologies such as data access control, encryption, data reduction and breach detection.

Read our complete Data Security guide here.

Why is Data Security Important?

In the digital world, data is critical to the viability of a business. Intellectual property, key performance indicators, consumer information and financial planning are just a small number of important functions to running a business that rely on data at their core. Implementing the right controls and technologies to protect data is directly related to a business’ survival. Moreover, it is fundamental to a company’s ability to innovate, succeed and grow.

However, this means that data is valuable to business rivals and malicious entities as well, given that it can be used by competitors to gain competitive advantages or monetized by hackers selling it on the black market. Malicious parties pose a variety of threats that businesses’ must proactively address and mitigate, including breach of data protection laws, reputational damage and financial loss.

For more information, read our complete data security guide.

Types of Data Security

There are many types of data security processes, standards and technologies used by organizations. Before we discuss them, it is important to understand the fundamental building blocks of a data security program.

Data security, or information security, focuses on three main areas of data protection:

  • Confidentiality: Ensuring that data is only accessed by authorized entities.
  • Integrity: Ensuring that data remains accurate and complete throughout its lifecycle.
  • Availability: Ensuring that data is available for use and processing when needed.

This framework, also referred to as the CIA triad, has inspired different types of data security processes, standards and technologies. Among them are:

  • Data access control
  • Data backup and restore
  • Encryption and tokenization
  • Breach detection and response
  • Data loss prevention

How do you Ensure Data Security?

Given data’s importance to enterprise success, the market has no shortage of dedicated data protection solutions. Though they vary in strategy and effectiveness, we have found that the following factors play determining roles in how well they they succeed:

  • Executive sponsorship: You would be hard-pressed to find a company stakeholder uninterested in protecting a valuable company asset like data. However, aligning on strategy and resource allocation for the task usually requires a healthy amount of persuasion. Organizations that have all of their key stakeholders (technology, security and legal) on the same page are much more likely to implement an effective program.

  • Data-centric approaches: As previously mentioned, there are many tools available to address the myriad threats to data security. However, few of them are comprehensive, leading many organizations to address each application of data individually. In such cases, this enormous and resource-intensive undertaking creates a bottleneck for innovation meant to drive a business further. To avoid this and improve security without slowing down business, It is in the interest of organizations to focus on protecting the data itself by placing safeguards around it.

  • Continuous monitoring for constant improvement: Information is moving faster than ever before. Technologies, processes and procedures that do not adjust and scale quickly enough to keep up are destined to become obsolete. This requires the focused and proactive implementation of solutions that allow you to monitor, measure and improve data-leveraging over time as well as keep it safe.

Last updated on

June 29, 2020

The information provided in this article and elsewhere on this website is meant purely for educational discussion and contains only general information about legal, commercial and other matters. It is not legal advice and should not be treated as such. Information on this website may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. The information in this article is provided “as is” without any representations or warranties, express or implied. We make no representations or warranties in relation to the information in this article and all liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are hereby expressly disclaimed. You must not rely on the information in this article as an alternative to legal advice from your attorney or other professional legal services provider. If you have any specific questions about any legal matter you should consult your attorney or other professional legal services provider. This article may contain links to other third-party websites. Such links are only for the convenience of the reader, user or browser; we do not recommend or endorse the contents of any third-party sites.