Bianca Visagie
10 June 2021
The importance of data security for your company cannot be understated. Your company collects, stores, and manages valuable and sensitive data every day. In order to protect that data from unauthorised access, corruption, or theft, data security is necessary. Data security is thus the practice and technology of protecting your company’s digital information.
The importance of data security for your company
Safeguarding your data protects your company from financial loss, reputation damage, consumer confidence disintegration, and brand erosion. There are also government regulations, such as the POPI Act in South Africa, to keep in mind.
It is also important to keep security in mind when hiring contractors to work in your company, or when integrating various platforms. Cybersecurity attacks can come from both inside and outside your company. Human error and insider threats are still the most common causes of data breaches.
Cyber incidents are the third most prominent risk for businesses worldwide. The rush towards digitalization during the 2020 pandemic has left many businesses vulnerable to cyber attacks. That is why data security should be a top priority for your company.
Types of data security protocols:
Understanding why security is important can help you formulate a plan to protect your data. There are many data security technologies that can safeguard your company’s data. Types of security protocols may include:
Access Control
Access control is the process of authentication and authorization. Your data should be access-controlled, and the physical servers on which your data is stored should also be access controlled. This allows you to control and track who access the data.
Data Masking
By masking data, companies can allow teams to develop applications or train people using real data. It masks personally identifiable information where necessary so that development can occur in environments that are compliant.
Encryption
Data encryption software effectively enhances data security by using an algorithm and an encryption key to turn normal text into encrypted ciphertext. Therefore, to an unauthorized person, the encrypted data will be unreadable. This offers an extra layer of protection for your data, as the data can only be decrypted by a person with the authorisation key.
Data Erasure
When data is no longer needed it must be permanently deleted from your systems. Data erasure can overwrite data so that it is irretrievable. In essence, this ensures that data cannot be recovered and reused.
Benefits of data security
As mentioned above, there are various fiscal benefits of data security. For instance, other benefits include:
- Improved confidence in the company’s reputation and trust for developers, partners, customers, stakeholders and employees,
- Protection for end-users and endpoint devices,
- Prevention of unauthorised access,
- Compliance with regulatory acts, which spares fines;
- And improved business continuity.
The challenges of data security
While there are many types of data security protocols, they also come with various challenges. The most difficult challenge in cybersecurity is the ever-evolving nature of security risks themselves. Traditionally, companies have focused most of their cybersecurity resources on protecting their most crucial system components. Today, this approach is ineffective, as the threats advance more quickly than companies can keep up with.
That’s why it’s important to have a data security strategy. A comprehensive data security strategy should incorporate people, processes, and technologies. In other words, data security should be a top priority in your company, and in the projects, your company takes on.
Cybersecurity at Integrove
Here at Integrove we provide bespoke digital solutions and integrations. Through our in-house security architects, we handle your data with the utmost sensitivity, and we protect your data from both inside and outside attacks. Contact us today to find out how we protect your data when building your digital solutions.