What is Data Security and How Can You Secure Your Business-Critical Data?

We are hearing more and more today about data security, and with high profile data breaches occurring on an almost daily basis, this is an area that businesses and organisations need to start taking much more seriously. But what is data security?

Data security is a set of standards and technologies that protects data from intentional or accidental destruction, modification or disclosure. It can be applied using a range of technologies including physical security, logical controls, administrative controls and other safeguarding techniques that limit access to unauthorised users or malicious processes or users.

Why is Data Security So Important?

All businesses deal with data to varying degrees on a day to day basis. From large corporate banking giants who deal with massive volumes of personal and financial data to the one-man band business who stores the contact details of his customers on a mobile phone. Data today is at the heart of every business and organisation, whether they be large or small.

Data security exists with the express aim of protecting the data that a business or organisation collects, stores, creates, receives or transmits. It does not matter which type of device, technology or process is used to manage store and collect that data, it MUST be protected.

Data breaches can result in huge fines and legal cases, and also cause a huge amount of damage to the reputation of a business or organisation that has suffered a security breach. Just recently both British Airways and Marriott Hotels have been subject to huge fines from the ICO as a result of suffering data breaches. The importance of protecting data from security threats is more important today than it has ever been.

How Can Data Classification, Discovery and Tagging Help Secure Your Data?

The boundaries in every enterprise are becoming much more blurred. Often you will find data on your endpoint, the cloud and your network, so enabling visibility into your data flows is an essential first step in understanding which data is at risk for misuse or theft if stolen in a cyber-attack. You should know exactly what data you hold, where it is stored and why it exists in order to protect it adequately. This is where data classification, discovery and tagging comes in.

From this you can create a fully scalable data security solution. File tagging, for example, can be used across platforms from Mac to Windows and allows you to tag files across the network, cloud and endpoint. From this you gain full visibility into data across your whole business or organisational infrastructure.

To find out more about data classification, discovery and tagging and how it can help your business or organisation, download a copy of our FREE eGuide “Business benefits from effective data classification, tagging and discovery”.

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