Cyber crime rose by more than 20% in 2023, and a data breach could cost your company millions of dollars in damages. Today’s organizations need a comprehensive enterprise data protection strategy to ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of sensitive data and prevent data breaches before they occur. In this guide, we'll cover the many facets of enterprise data protection and discuss best practices that can keep your business safe.
What is enterprise data protection?
Enterprise data protection refers to the strategies, processes, technologies, and policies organizations use to safeguard sensitive information. It’s built upon three pillars:
- Security—keeps unauthorized users from accessing, stealing, or modifying data.
- Integrity—ensures that data stays healthy and usable.
- Accessibility—makes it possible for workers and customers to get what they need when they need it.
Why is data protection important for enterprises?
In the U.S., the average cost of a data breach for an organization is $9.48 million. That number has been climbing every year since 2017, with costs that include everything from ransoms and legal fees to damage liabilities and lost productivity. Even worse, your company’s reputation could take a massive hit, making it very difficult to ever regain your customers’ trust.
Proactive investment in data protection not only helps you avoid this catastrophe, it also gives your business a competitive edge. Seventy-four percent of people highly value data privacy as one of the top ethical issues we face today. By taking a proactive approach to security, integrity, and accessibility, you can demonstrate to customers that you take those issues seriously as well.
What are the different types of enterprise data protection?
The bigger the organization, the more complex data protection becomes. Meeting its diverse challenges requires a web of techniques and technologies, each working to reinforce the next. Here are some of the most valuable.
Data encryption
Ideally, threat actors would never gain access to your systems. But if they ever do, nothing would make them happier than finding data stored as plaintext. In this form, data is completely unprotected, and bad actors can have a field day with it.
Encryption applies complex algorithms to data, turning it into illegible gibberish — unless the user has the appropriate decryption key. A good enterprise digital rights management (EDRM) solution will provide you with encryption that protects your data even when it leaves your organization’s sphere of influence.
Data masking and anonymization
Of course, not all data can be encrypted at all times. IT teams and application developers need workable data to build and test software. However, using sensitive customer data in these test environments can expose it to hackers.
The solution: data masking. Data masking creates fake yet realistic data that can safely be used for design and testing. For example, if a financial technology company needs banking and routing numbers to create its remote deposit app, data masking can give it data that looks and acts the same way actual customer data would without putting real customer data at risk.
Data backup and recovery
If you've ever had your computer die without warning, you know how important backups are. With a recent and secure backup, even a disaster like that can have minimal impact on your productivity. Things get much more complicated in an enterprise context, as backups must include not just data, but also apps, operating systems, virtual machines, and even container workloads. If bad actors get into any of these locations, they can hold your company ransom and severely disrupt work.
If a bad actor lies undetected in your network, there’s a chance they’re hiding in your backups, too. Maintaining multiple backups can raise the odds of a clean instance, but if they’re connected to the internet or each other, bad actors can reach one from your main network and then jump from backup to backup, compromising each as they go. To avoid that, enterprise data protection can isolate backups from one another and keep network connectivity to a minimum via air gapping.
Access control
Enterprise data protection is about more than keeping bad actors out. Whether HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, or any other regulatory requirement, enterprise data protection is also about meeting compliance standards means having a tight grip on access controls. Starting from the moment a device tries to connect to a network or app, companies should take a zero-trust approach and scan the device to ensure it’s secure before granting it access.
Even if the device proves healthy, its actions should be carefully monitored, and it should only be granted access to sensitive data through gated requests. Any sensitive data downloaded should automatically undergo redacting, watermarking, and encryption.
Data loss prevention (DLP)
When data stores get big enough, keeping track of everything inside them can become a challenge of its own. When that data contains particularly sensitive information such as personally identifiable information (PII), bank accounts, or medical histories, knowing where it is—and that it’s safe—becomes critically important.
Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions help you find, monitor, and control the movement of sensitive data. They also allow your IT and security teams to set and enforce policies to protect it.
Anomaly detection
Every day a worker logs into your systems, they'll generally perform the same set of actions in a similar pattern. If a bad actor were to steal their credentials, their behavior would suddenly look very different. They’re liable to try to access different apps, data stores, or functions in an effort to steal important information. If your system can spot these unusual behavioral patterns, it can help stop bad actors in their tracks.
Where things get tricky is in determining how far from the norm activity must deviate before it triggers an alert. Too sensitive, and your system can flood you with false positives. Not sensitive enough, and you may miss genuine vulnerabilities. With user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), you can fine-tune these alerts over time with minimal human intervention.
Enterprise data protection best practices
The following best practices can help you establish and adhere to a data security strategy at your organization.
Discover where your data is
Complete data protection begins by making a map of where all of your data lives — every device, every network, every data store, every cloud, and so on. Only once you know where all your data is can you truly begin to protect it.
Classify sensitive data
Next, you can start organizing your data into categories, making it easier to understand and communicate about protection strategies. Here are some common classifications:
- Personally identifiable information (PII)
- Financial information
- Intellectual property (IP)
- Protected health information (PHI)
Establish data handling policies
Humans are often the weakest link in a security system. The best way to prevent social engineering attacks is by setting clear, easy-to-follow rules about how employees can work with different data sets. They need to know what kind of data they can store, where to store it, how they can transfer it, who else can look at it, and how long to keep it.
Your organization, your industry, and the regulations that govern them will evolve over time. To stay ahead of these changes, you should aim to update your data handling policies regularly.
Monitor and control data in real time
The fastest way to catch suspicious activity is to monitor how employees work. What devices do they use to connect to your systems? From where do they connect? What apps do they typically use, and how do they use them? When you can compare their current activity against past behavior, you can spot aberrations quickly.
In addition to monitoring data usage, you can control it using digital rights management (DRM). DRM lets you selectively encrypt data, set time limits on access, and restrict individual pieces of data with watermarks or redaction.
Remediate problems as they occur
The final step for enterprise data protection is putting these tools and policies into practice. When anomalies pop up, your solution should act immediately to prevent the download, ask for step-up authentication, or cut off access entirely as the case demands.
A unified policy engine can facilitate this remediation by bringing everything into a single dashboard. From there, you can keep an eye on activity and enforce security policies to power simple, comprehensive protection.
Master enterprise data protection with Lookout
Enterprise data protection covers a lot of ground, and there’s very little margin for error. You need a partner you can trust—a partner like Lookout.
The Lookout Cloud Security Platform provides comprehensive data security for organizations across various industries and sizes. Our suite of products includes Secure Cloud Access (CASB), Secure Internet Access (SWG), and Secure Private Access (ZTNA), which enable organizations to keep their data secure wherever it resides. Whether your data’s in private apps, cloud apps, or web destinations, Lookout has you covered.
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