With businesses switching to cloud technology and employees preferring to work from home, data protection practices and protocols are essential. This is due to the rise in cyberattacks on personal and corporate data.
Keeping passwords and other information safe and protected from cybercriminals has long been a priority of businesses. However, growing concerns over consumer privacy have changed how organisations manage and share the data they collect.
Nevertheless, even companies with a good data protection system can find it difficult to keep up with new privacy regulations and practices. Here are five data protection practices businesses should adopt.
Critical Practices for Ensuring Data Protection
1. Collect Minimal Client Data
Firstly, ensure that your business’s policies indicate the necessary data to collect.
If you collect more data than needed, you increase your liability and burden your IT security teams. Moreover, minimising your data collection can also help you save on bandwidth and storage.
2. Create A Data Protection Policy
A data protection policy is necessary for businesses to standardise data use, monitoring, and management.
An effective data protection policy should include:
- Data protection techniques applied by the different departments and devices within the organisation
- Legal or compliance requirements for data protection
- How staff members will be trained and supervised in handling personal data
Read More: Cloud Server: What’s the Best Way to Keep Your Data Safe?
3. Control Access To Sensitive Data
Sensitive data is strictly confidential information that must be protected, such as personal health information, education records and cardholder data.
As a result, access to sensitive data should be managed through security practices designed to prevent data leaks and breaches.
4. Back Up Your Data
The purpose of a data backup is to store a copy of the business’s data on a separate medium that can be recovered during an unexpected data failure.
Examples of data failures include:
- Hardware or software failure
- Data corruption
- Malicious virus attacks
- Accidental deletion of data
Additionally, businesses should carry out a data backup regularly to minimise the data lost between backups.
5. Protect Against Insider Threats
Most organisations spend an exceptional amount of time and resources on securing their data from external attacks; however, insider threats are equally as important.
Insider threats are security risks that originate within the organisation and come in two forms: authorised and unauthorised.
An authorised insider threat involves a current or former employee with access to sensitive information. It occurs when authorised employees misuse their access either on purpose or accidentally or when their credentials are stolen.
On the other hand, unauthorised insider threats are caused by employees who do not adhere to corporate security policies or carelessly use company systems or data.
Furthermore, insider threats can lead to data loss or downtime. Therefore, it is essential to diversify your data protection strategy to include external attacks and internal threats as well.
Read More: Protecting Remote Office 365 User Data is Critical
How Can Aegis Help?
It is critical for businesses to adopt data protection practices to keep their sensitive information safe. However, with so many policies to enforce, this can seem like a daunting challenge for any IT security team.
Aegis can help businesses simplify data protection. Aegis Disaster Recovery As-A-Service (DRaaS) is a cloud computing and backup service model that utilises cloud resources to minimise downtime and disruption to business operations.
It has a range of managed cloud disaster recovery services to protect a business’s critical data and systems. Examples include free unlimited cloud DR resources and a dedicated DR drill team to ease the burden on IT security teams in Malaysia.