With the rise in reliance of businesses on cloud computing, big data, and analytics, data security has become a challenge for almost all organizations. Data security is dependent on data privacy to a greater extent.

Encryption

The first and most important strategy for data security is encryption and tokenization. With a trusted data encryption solution, your data will be translated into a unique code. This makes the data highly secure. Only people who have the decryption key or password will be able to access and read the encrypted data. Depending on your preference and needs, the asymmetric encryption or symmetric encryption methods may be used.

Data confidentiality has gained immense importance as organizations increasingly use the Internet, PCs, and different networks to transmit data. It is time for organizations to move away from the old data encryption standard to modern approaches that use algorithms to protect your data.

A good data encryption solution covers systems, digital devices, email, applications and the data itself. Remember, given the widespread use of external drives, removable media, and cloud storages by your employees, data protection is a big challenge. In order to tackle this challenge, the data must be secured through auto-encryption. This means that unauthorized persons cannot decrypt even any data that is copied.

One of the most modern, popular, effective, and reliable encryption methods used for data security is tokenization. This method is reliable and unfailing in that tokenization replaces the sensitive data with exclusive symbols without damaging or changing the data itself. This helps decrease the volume of data your organization has to keep handy. This data security encryption solution is gaining popularity among organizations that handle credit card information and run e-commerce businesses.

Discovery and Classification

As more and more organization give their workers the choice to work remotely, business operations are being performed in the cloud at an increasing rate. Data sharing and storage is unavoidable in telecommuting. While the trend of remote working comes with immense benefits, it poses data security challenges to organizations.

Today’s organizations must know where their data is and how it is being handled. As a result of the interdependence between business functions, data is stored in different places, such as PCs, digital devices, applications, cloud, databases, shared systems…you name it. As such, data security is now a challenge for businesses.

The good news is that data discovery and classification makes it very easy to identify your enterprise’s data in its entirety. You should make sure that your data is precisely located, classified, and made secure with reliable and trusted control mechanisms that comply with the regulatory standards and the industry’s best practices.

Remember, whether you are in the healthcare, financial, government, education, or enterprise niche, if your company’s data falls into the wrong hands, it could translate into substantial damage for your organization

Here are some tips for data discovery and classification:

Discover the data in your network file shares, cloud, systems, and SharePoint to assess their sensitivity and importance to your business

• Identify the worth and critical nature of the data, so you know what data you have, where it is located, and ways to secure it
• Classify the data on the basis of the content and context
• Secure the data in the places where they are stored
• Isolate the data that is not protected and flagging data for risk analysis