Data breaches are all over the news. It is estimated that ransomware costs US state and local governments $623,700,000 in 2021. Today, organizations are acutely conscious that even if they have attained PCI or SOX compliances, new laws like the GDPR need more tighter data security controls. The basic package isn’t enough anymore.

What is the best you are entitled to do about it? Implement data security solutions and techniques, but first:

What is Data Security?

Data security is known as the process of safeguarding company data and avoiding data loss due to illegal access. This entails protecting your data from assaults that can alter or damage it, as well as assaults that can encrypt or destroy it, like ransomware.

The survival of a modern corporation, however, depends on data security.  Which affect both the organization’s important assets and the private information of its clients. Even if your organization is not subject to a legislation or compliance requirement.

Data Security Solutions

Software providers offer a range of technologies that help to increase data security. Here are 10 different categories of data security solutions that thriving businesses worldwide are using:

1. Data Discovery and Classification Software

Any plan for data security starts with data discovery. An organization is meant to be aware of the storage data they have, including which of that data is sensitive and needs to be protected. Both structured and unstructured datastores, such as file systems, relational databases, NoSQL databases, data warehouses, and cloud storage buckets, have to be scanned by data discovery technologies.

Datasets can be automatically mapped, sensitive information may be found, and flaws that could compromise data security can be found.

2. Fireball Block

A firewall separates one network from another, making it one of the first lines of protection for a network. The network’s unwanted traffic is blocked by firewalls. Additionally, you only have to open specific ports, which limits the amount of room that hackers have to enter your system or download your data. The firewall entirely blocks certain traffic or all traffic, or it performs a verification on some or all the traffic, depending on the organization’s firewall policy.

Firewalls are standalone or integrated systems into other network equipment like servers or routers. Both hardware and software firewall solutions are available.

3. Data Masking

For software testing, training, and other uses that don’t require the actual data, data masking enables you to produce a synthetic version of your organizational data. The goal is to protect data while offering a useful fallback when necessary.

Data masking modifies the values while keeping the data’s original type. Encryption, character shuffles, character or word replacement, and other techniques are all used to alter data. Further, you are able to alter the values in a way it is impossible for them to be backward engineered, regardless of the approach you select.

4. IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems)

Deep packet inspection is a technique used by conventional intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to identify possibly harmful activities in network traffic.

IDS is set up to examine the system event logs, scan the network for suspicious behavior, and send out alerts for sessions that seem to go against security settings.

IPS provides detection capabilities and has the ability to end malicious sessions, though this is often only done in the case of very crude and visible attacks like DDoS.

5. Automated Compliance Reporting and Management

Compliance and data security are tightly intertwined, and many data security problems also pose a risk to compliance. Automated compliance management technologies scan an organization’s systems for specific compliance issues. Have the necessary compliance standards built in, and automatically provide the reports that auditors demand. By using these technologies, the manual work required to identify and address compliance concerns across the organization are drastically reduced.

6. Tools for Vulnerability Management

Numerous vulnerability management, scanning, and remediation technologies are available to assist with addressing vulnerabilities in IT systems. These technologies, for instance, have the ability to spot software that needs to be patched or updated.  Security weaknesses in data storage, weak passwords, and vulnerabilities unique to databases, including code injection.

7. Backup and Recovery

In the event that data is lost or damaged, an organization is able to safeguard themselves with the use of a backup and recovery solution. To ensure redundancy, all essential company assets have to be routinely duplicated. This allows you to swiftly recover your data in the event of a server failure, deletion by accident, intentional ransomware damage, or other threats.

8. Cloud Security Solutions

Data is increasingly being collected and stored by both individuals and businesses. As a result, we now have cloud storage in addition to direct attached storage (DAS), network area storage (NAS), and storage area networks (SAN). Now, you are able to store an increasing amount of data using cloud storage.  Your provider will take care of scalability concerns rather than local administrators.

9. Authenticated Access Control

Users are not typically permitted to copy or store sensitive data locally; instead, they are required to manage the data remotely. Furthermore, critical data is ideally meant to never be kept on a portable machine of any kind. Every system demands some sort of login, and it has to be set up with conditions to lock the system if suspicious activity is detected.

10. Big Data Security

Large datasets and data analysis procedures are protected using procedures and tools that are part of big data security. Financial logs, healthcare data, data lakes, archives, and business intelligence datasets are some examples of big data. Large-scale data breaches, leaks, losses, and exfiltration are all things that big data security attempts to stop, both unintentionally and on purpose.

In conclusion, many ransomware types are quickly spreading through the world and throughout corporate networks infecting sizable portions of it. There is no way to recover if a company does not run regular backups or if ransomware is able to infiltrate the backup systems. Therefore, data security solutions are a must in every business, in any industry.

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About Centurion Consulting Group

Centurion Consulting Group, LLC, a Woman-Owned Small Business headquartered in Herndon, VA conveniently located near Washington D.C., is a national IT Services consulting firm servicing the public and private sector by delivering relevant solutions for ourclient’s complex business and technology challenges. Our leadership team has over 40 years of combined experience, including almost 10 years of a direct business partnership, in the IT staffing, federal contracting, and professional services industries. Centurion’s leaders have the demonstrated experience over the past three decades in partnering with over 10,000 consultants and hundreds of clients from Fortune 100 to Inc. 5000 firms –in multiple industries including banking, education, federal, financial,healthcare, hospitality, insurance, non-profit, state and local, technology, and telecommunications. www.centurioncg.com.