While you might only think data protection applies to large organizations, it’s also essential for small businesses. Hackers and other cybercriminals regularly target small businesses to steal sensitive data, making data protection a must-have for any organization. When you implement data protection strategies, you can maintain an excellent reputation, avoid operational downtime, keep your data secure, and protect your business against legal action. Let’s examine what data protection is and why it’s important for any business.
What is Data Protection?
Data protection refers to the processes and mechanisms that safeguard an organization’s data from compromise, loss, theft, and corruption. Often used interchangeably with the term ‘data security’, data protection is not just about safeguarding sensitive information but also about ensuring it remains accessible and reliable, thereby preserving trust and compliance in data-centric operations. Data protection and privacy typically apply to Personal Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). By implementing data protection measures, organizations protect themselves and their customers against identity theft and phishing scams. Some of the main types of data organizations aim to protect:
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Names
- Medical information
- Bank and credit card details
- Home addresses
Importance of Data Protection
With the increasing reliance on the cloud and online transactions, many organizations are handling more and more data. Threats, both external and internal to an organization, seek to compromise its data security for their own benefit. Data breaches often aim to steal information from a company, sell it to others, or use it to commit acts of fraud.
Protection Principles
Data protection principles help protect your data and make it available under any circumstances. It covers operational data backup and business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR), and involves implementing data management and data availability measures.
According to Cloudian.com, here are the key data management aspects relevant to data protection:
- Data availability — Ensures users can access and use the data required to perform business, even when this data is lost or damaged.
- Data lifecycle management — involves automating the transfer of critical data to both offline and online storage.
- Information lifecycle management — Involves the valuation, cataloging, and protection of information assets from various sources. This includes facility outages and disruptions, application and user errors, machine failure, malware, and virus attacks.
Risks of not having data protection
Sometimes, small and medium-sized business owners think they don’t face much risk from data breaches. They usually believe that cybercriminals are more likely to target larger organizations. However, this line of thinking doesn’t hold up to reality, as 43% of data breaches affect small and medium-sized businesses.
If you don’t take data security seriously, you can open yourself up to several risks, including:
- Financial penalties: At this time, businesses and organizations may be fined up to $100,000 per violation.
- Further legal action: While OPC has limited jurisdiction and penalties, organizations in violation of PIPEDA may be referred to the Attorney General of Canada for further legal action. Organizations may then be audited, forced into compliance agreements, asked to disclose vital company behaviour to the public, or otherwise punished.
- Reputational loss: Public perception is one of the strongest motivators for compliance. When the public discovers that an organization has breached PIPEDA, the OPC publicly denounces a business for PIPEDA non-compliance.
- Data Loss: Data breaches result in the theft of sensitive personal data. Hackers can use the data to conduct scams or commit fraud. Beyond the effects on consumers, stolen data can significantly harm a company’s operations, as hackers often delete it.
- Operational downtime: A significant risk organizations often overlook in their data protection is the downtime after a data breach. Once a data breach occurs, the responsible organization must first contain it and then investigate how it happened. During these stages, a company may need to shut down its operations entirely until the investigation is completed.
Main elements of data protection
Given the many risks of unprotected data, data security for small businesses is essential. You can implement a few main elements of data protection to guard yourself against these concerns:
1. Official data protection policies
One of the best ways to begin protecting your data is to create official data protection policies for your business. These policies should be detailed and unambiguous to ensure your employees know what’s expected of them. These policies should also include corrective actions employees can follow when security threats occur. This also includes safely disposing of and destroying any confidential data you may no longer use or need.
2. Staff training and education
Another way you can implement data protection practices at your business is with staff education and training sessions. These training sessions will often cover cybersecurity basics, including avoiding harmful websites, not opening files from suspicious emails, and ensuring staff don’t use passwords that include personal details. It’s often a good idea to make education a consistent practice. You can regularly send staff reminders on handling sensitive data and provide refresher courses.
3. Data backups
In the event of a data breach, system failure, data corruption, or disaster, your company can lose its data. Without this data, you will struggle to perform operations and suffer reputational damage from dissatisfied customers. Part of an effective data protection strategy involves using data backups. Many companies turn to cloud storage solutions for data backup. With a cloud solution, data is stored on secure, off-site servers that remain unaffected if an organization loses its original data.
4. Data encryption
Encryption keys are critical for data protection. When you encrypt your data, a computer algorithm converts it into an unreadable form that unauthorized users can’t decipher. If a data breach occurs, encrypting your device’s hard drives provides an additional line of defence against bad actors who may try to exploit your data.
5. Data monitoring and reporting
If you want to stop data breaches in their tracks, you need comprehensive data monitoring and reporting tools. With data monitoring, you can test and prove your protection and security policies. This also lets you log all your network activity. Alongside monitoring data activity, a great system will send reports to personnel highlighting potential threats.
6. Secure software
When you want the best possible protection, you’ll likely rely on security software from a data protection company. Having secure software makes it easier to detect and prevent data breaches.
Data Protection vs. Data Privacy
The terms data protection and data privacy are often used interchangeably. However, there is an important difference between the two. Data privacy defines who has access to data, while data protection provides tools and policies to restrict that access. Although both data protection and data privacy are important (the two often overlap), these terms do not mean the same thing.
One addresses policies, and the other mechanisms
Data privacy focuses on defining who has access to data, while data protection focuses on enforcing those restrictions. Data privacy refers to the policies that govern data protection tools and processes. Creating data privacy guidelines does not ensure that unauthorized users cannot access data. Likewise, you can restrict access through data protection measures while leaving sensitive data vulnerable. Both are needed to ensure that data remains secure.
Users control privacy, companies ensure protection
Another important distinction between privacy and protection is who typically controls them. For privacy, users can often control how much of their data is shared and with whom. For protection, it is up to the companies handling data to ensure that it remains private. Compliance regulations reflect this difference and are designed to help ensure that companies honour users’ privacy requests.
Cyber Insurance and Data Protection
Did you know there is insurance available to protect you from cyber incidents? This is known as Cyber Liability Insurance. This insurance is crucial when organizing and running a business, especially if you regularly use technology and the internet. Cyber Liability Insurance will protect you and your business from internet-based risks. It is of the utmost importance for ensuring data protection.
At the end of the day, staying safe and secure online is no easy task. With that said, practicing the data protection best practices outlined above can go a long way toward keeping your business safe from bad actors. If you have any questions about cyber liability insurance, please contact us at isure or request a quote.
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