Step Up Your Security This Data Privacy Day

The new year is well and truly underway, which means businesses will be working hard at taking steps to ensure a successful year. Alongside business growth goals, your company’s new year’s resolutions should focus on security and ensuring data privacy is upheld. If not, you’re not alone. In fact oversights and negligence about data protection is one of the reasons Data Privacy Day is now an annually celebrated day.

Data Privacy Day is held on the 28th of January every year and gives businesses, governments, and others the opportunity to carry out activities to raise awareness about the rights to personal data protection and privacy.

Individuals are generally unfamiliar with the risks related to the protection of their personal data and of their rights. But it’s time to stop making data excuses and start embracing data responsibility.

Regain control of your data

Data security and privacy has become a fundamental aspect of our connected world. We now regard the protection of people’s personal information as a human right. Most organisations have accepted that as custodians of data, they bear the critical responsibility of ensuring personal information is protected.

Your business’ security is only as strong as your weakest entry point. Internal data environments, such as non-production test environments, are often low on the security priority list but can still represent a huge risk to the business. It is important, therefore, that data in internal test environments have the same security software controls as external facing production environments. This can be through data masking, which protects data in these non-production environments and ensures businesses strive to not only protect sensitive data but also comply with regulations.

We need to protect data in a way that keeps sensitive information safe and preserves our capacity to test effectively, maintain rapid feature delivery, and draw business insights from data. So how can organisations successfully protect their data without compromising productivity?

Get ahead of the game

The secret to keeping your business secure is to protect data from the inside. While techniques like data masking help eliminate personal information from data troves, it’s useless if you can’t deliver the data to the people in your business whose job it is to work with it day after day.

Most businesses today lack a firm grasp of their data – where it lives, who has access to it and how it’s being shared. At a large enterprise, the scale of managing data can be overwhelming and can cause tremendous data friction in a company’s digital operations and data recovery. Often times, organisations tend to focus their efforts and investments in protecting the exterior alone. But breaches can and do happen from the inside.

In fact, up to 90% of valuable data lives in internal, downstream environments like development, testing, and analytics. Failing to protect the sensitive data in these locations can significantly open your organisation up to security breaches.

Boosting data security

Data privacy is only effective if it enables businesses to keep working productively.

The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation meant that secure data is now a requirement for businesses. As organisations look at how they store, manage and secure data as part of compliance demands there is also an opportunity to think about how data can be better used. This will not only future-proof the business from costly data breaches but also ensure compliance while improving agility and time-to-market.

Data Privacy Day falls in January and ensuring it’s not just a resolution for the new year is integral. You should strive to ensure secure data is a fundamental element to your business.―Tech Radar