It’s essential for enterprises to act as stalwart guardians of personal and sensitive data. The necessary measures needed to offer optimum data protection need to be comprehensive, and adaptable. Strict regulations need to be followed because of today’s data-driven landscape. Lapses in protective measures can lead to consequent damages that are difficult to overcome.
An example would be the 2017 Equifax data breach which led to a whopping $575 million settlement with the FTC in 2019, of which an estimated $300 million compensated to the affected consumers. Lack of prior consideration of protective measures and security practices can lead to weighty fines and reputational damages that are irreversible. This is why enterprises should follow a privacy-by-design concept and include data protection in their very foundations. This innate consideration would automatically reduce exposure to risks and potential threats of breaches or loss of data due to human error.
Enterprises need to streamline policies and active programs to combat any potential risks or threats, a few of these could include:
The Use of Encryption: Stringent encryption policies need to be followed by enterprises to ensure their sensitive data is encrypted and not as readily available to be put at risk. Proper and robust encryption would allow enterprises to be one step ahead in case a threat actualizes, it would provide enterprises with an advantage and give them time to recuperate and recover from the data breach and put restorative counter-measures in action.
Awareness and Training Campaigns for Employees: Enterprises should ensure proper training is exercised among their employees including maintaining password hygiene, two-factor authentication, and practicing protocols put in place in case of a data breach. Employees should be given ample training to ensure the implementation of protocols in case of a potential threat. They should be told what a potential threat would actually look like, for example, phishing scams. This would also help reduce human errors.
Maintaining Backups: Maintaining proper backups would ensure relevant information is accessible in case of any data loss due to a breach or potential threat. This would help in recovering any sensitive data and would soften some of the consequences of a data breach. Having updated backups would also help organizations focus on combating the culprit causing the data breach, and working on refining their own policies in place.
Archiving: The archival of data could be an important way to secure and preserve enterprise data by not letting it be available for exposure to any risks of data breaches. This would help organizations to keep track of their data without letting it be exposed to any potential threats.
Performing Audits and Self-Assessments: Regular assessment of the risk management programs of an enterprise (where they align third-party vendors to audit or perform a self-assessment) could help point out any shortcomings in their Data Loss Prevention programs or other policies that aid them in ensuring the enterprise can map how their data is being shared within or outside of the enterprise.
Application of Certified Privacy Frameworks: The use of privacy frameworks like the NIST Privacy Framework which is a valuable tool that can help organizations improve their privacy practices with its evolving scalability and minimal effort or the ISO 27701. The latter is a certified framework, which is in proper compliance with the GDPR and could be a structure to help combat any data privacy-related violations for enterprises. The use of such privacy frameworks could provide enterprises with a skeletal framework to align their policies with and solidify their data protective policies.
Enterprises need to use agile and adaptable data protective solutions that are easily implementable and scalable according to the unique needs of an enterprise.