How Businesses Can Protect Customer Data

Gone are the days when we only talked about network security, IT security, and operating system security. However, with the ever-changing world dynamics, we need to focus more on cyber security and the muddy water around it.

Cyber security in the last decade has turned out to be one of the biggest worrying issues of the 21st century. The gravity of cyber attacks can be understood by the statement made by Businesswire in one of their articles - A global analysis of 1,000 CIOs finds that - “82% of CIOs say their organizations are vulnerable to cyberattacks targeting software supply chains at large.”

Therefore, it is high time we consider our customer’s data privacy and protection. This will have many joint effects like - winning customers’ trust and achieving data ethics, among others. Therefore, this article will discuss each dimension covering data protection and why we need to do it to help our customers.

Data protection can be defined as the process wherein we try to protect our customer’s digital data from digital cyber attacks. However, we do try to make sure that the economic/ technical/ cultural/ commercial value remains intact.

Data protection is no easy job to do, especially with the ever-increasing velocity of big data generation, the process has become very complex. However, in order to maintain data integrity and ethics, it is necessary to always keep an eye on data protection. This will help every stakeholder, like government, businesses, end users, etc., who are involved in the complex data cycle.

With the increasing number of connected digital devices, commercial data-based services, and modern technologies, the velocity of big data generation is growing exponentially. This data lake consists of different kinds of important personal, commercial, as well as private data. So, if that data migrates to some wrong hands, it will certainly do unimaginable harm.

This is why 137 of 194 countries have enacted legislation to ensure data and privacy protection, according to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Thus, it is the need of the hour to focus on protecting customer data using various tools, techniques, and technologies.

Let’s go through 3 main objectives behind protecting customer data -

To ensure that data is easily accessible from anywhere and at any time that the customer or enterprise requires it. Data access allows anyone in any role or business unit to use data, allowing them to gain critical insights and make informed decisions at work.

The availability of data is a must to get some valuable insights out of it. So, to allow several services to run smoothly, data protection is mandatory.

Although it is too difficult to maintain privacy in this interweaved world but at the same time it is important. As privacy is a fundamental right which is necessary for autonomy and the protection of human dignity, and it serves as the foundation for many other human rights.

Hence in order to maintain and achieve data privacy, the first step should be - data security and protection.

Now we have a clear message and understanding that we need to protect our data against all the odds. But the big question here is - how?

Let us now explore several tools, techniques, and technologies that can help us in protecting the customer’s data.

It is one of the most crucial steps in data protection. This can help you understand the utility of the data to protect. In addition to that, it also hints about - the relevancy, veracity, objectivity, and truthfulness of data, among others.
Hence analysis of data is necessary before moving on to the next steps.

Credentials management asks/suggest users - have strong credentials for a strong hold over their data. In addition to that, the seasonal data security practitioners also suggest a renewal of credentials for better security.

While access control deals with any circumstance of a data breach through validating credentials and all. On the other hand, several authentication mechanisms such as - two-step verification, a captcha, bot detection, etc. can be integrated to make sure our data is secure and safe.

Though we do try our best to protect the data against all the odds, sometimes the situation can go out of hand, causing - data loss. Therefore, to halt any possible cases of data loss, breach, deletion, etc. data loss prevention (DLP) mechanism is used.

DLP mechanism tries to fix the negatives done by data loss, breach, or deletion by using certain internal mechanisms. These internal mechanisms are aligned to the type of odds/ negatives we are facing.

To ensure integrated data protection (IDP) mechanism is in place, we need to ensure that these two factors are incorporated into the current storage device. These factors are -

• Data redundancy
• Data clustering

Encryption uses the science of cryptography for data protection using public and private keys. Encryption helps in protecting customers' data from unauthorized and unwanted access.

Though backup is a very traditional data protection method, it still makes sense. Backup of data helps in easy data access in the case of data removal, destruction, loss, and corruption, among many others.

Though it may sound similar to data backup yet both of these are different in operations. Data replication involves the migration of data to a more secure, and safe location or network. One catch in data replication is that - you need to constantly update it based on the changes made in the primary location.

In order to monitor the network traffic against any possible case of unauthorized and unwanted digital access, viruses, malware, trojans, etc. firewall can be used. So, to protect your data, please ensure your firewall is active all the time and around the clock.

It is a unique type of data protection wherein we take a complete image of the protection system that contains information like -

• System files
• User data

Snapshot allows us to revert back to the previous secure state during the time of any possible data breach, loss, or similar situations.

Once the data is thoroughly analyzed and insights drawn, ensure the data is erased or stored for secondary purposes safely.

Thus, data security is paramount in the current state of the world, where the dark web is growing faster than ever before. Therefore, we can’t beat around the bush to resolve any possible case of data loss. So, the better idea here should be to prevent any such mal activity, and if any mishap occurs, you can surely use one of the above techniques and technologies to sort it out.

So, moving ahead, we can say that enterprises, businesses, and organizations, irrespective of their size, location, and domain, need to have a security engineer or similar. Doing this will make their data safe and customers happy. So, even if you are looking for one such skilled professional, feel free to sign up at Turing.com to get the best professionals from across the globe.