The 6 Pillars of Data Security Management

What Is Data Security Management?

Data is the raw information stored on computers and network servers, often in a database in tabular form. Organizations establish data security policies to protect the privacy of their data.

Any organization that stores and processes confidential business files and sensitive data subject to governmental regulations and industry standards, including personally identifiable information (PII), must have a data security strategy.

Data security management allows you to maintain data integrity and ensure that unauthorized individuals cannot access or corrupt your data. Given the massive data volumes generated by modern organizations, it is important to consider data management in your data security policy and leverage automated data security and management tools.

Why Is Data Security Management Important?

The vast majority of organizations fail to secure all their files and folders properly. Data security management can help you stay on top of data-related threats, reduce the risk of a data breach, and respond to successful attacks.

Implementing data security management can help you:

• Reduce costs—data breaches can be expensive, especially if in the form of a ransomware attack that locks your business-critical data. If you don’t have adequate backups, you may have to pay a ransom or risk losing your data.
• Maintain business continuity—data breaches can disrupt your business operations. Even an hour of downtime can lower customer satisfaction and cause significant financial losses.
• Maintain compliance—if your organization processes or stores sensitive data covered by local or international regulations, you need to ensure its protection to maintain compliance.
• Protect your reputation—organizations must report successful attacks or data loss incidents. If you expose or lose customer data, it can affect customer trust and damage your business’s reputation.

Common Data Security Threats

Here are some of the main threats affecting your data security:

Unintended Data Exposure

Many data breaches result from accidental or negligent exposure of data rather than malicious attacks. Employees might mishandle sensitive data and share it without sufficient security measures, granting access to malicious actors. You should implement security measures like robust access controls and data loss prevention (DLP) tools to address this risk.

Insider Threats

Most successful attacks come from inside an organization via a malicious or negligent employee or an infiltrator. Insider threats include:

• Malicious insiders—users who intentionally damage the system or exfiltrate data.
• Non-malicious insiders—users who accidentally damage the system or leak data due to negligence or lack of security understanding.
• Compromised insiders—users whose credentials or accounts have been compromised without their knowledge, allowing an external attacker to impersonate them within the system.

Social Engineering

A major attack vector that encompasses a range of attack types that manipulate privileged users into granting access to sensitive data or accounts. The most common technique is phishing, where the attacker sends an email that appears to come from a legitimate sender.

Ransomware

A type of malware that encrypts sensitive data, so you cannot use it without a decryption key. Typically, the attacker demands that you pay a ransom in exchange for the decryption key.

Loss of Cloud-Hosted Data

Moving your data to the cloud can make it easier to share and collaborate, but it can be harder to manage your data security and prevent loss. Your users may access sensitive data from their devices or via unsecured networks. To help protect your data in the cloud and prevent data loss, you should combine cloud security tools with a strong backup strategy.

Data Security Management Fundamentals

An effective data management strategy should be adaptable and scalable to address emerging risks and improve continuously. Here are six pillars that should underpin a successful data security management program.

1. Visibility

Tag your data to ensure visibility and manage data prioritization based on your organization’s needs.

2. Monitoring

Monitoring is essential to detect and manage internal and external threats. You should always use a separate system to monitor your network.

3. Encryption

Ensure that data is accessible only on a need-to-know basis. Encryption provides a crucial, added layer of protection that prevents attackers from using stolen data.

4. Security as Code

You can enhance your DevSecOps strategy with security as code to add a layer of protection to all program development processes.

5. Automation

Automation allows you to enforce your security policies and execute your security as code programs. Automated tests can help you check your existing infrastructure for security gaps.

6. Review

Third-party assessments can help you understand your data security requirements and create better governance practices.

Data Security Management with Satori

Satori, The DataSecOps platform, gives companies the ability to enforce security policies from a single location, across all databases, data warehouses and data lakes.