In today’s fast-paced and increasingly competitive business landscape, digital innovation isn’t just desirable if an organisation wants to thrive – it’s essential for it to survive. Fortunately, between modern software development practices, such as low-code and no-code, and cloud-based applications and services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), digital innovation is easier than ever.
However, more digital solutions mean more digitised data, and as a company’s digital footprint grows, so does the amount of sensitive data it has to safeguard. The most important of which is the personally identifiable information (PII) of its employees, supply chain partners, and, most crucially, its customers.
With this in mind, let’s delve into the top data privacy tips and explore 10 of the most critical security best practices for protecting PII and other sensitive data.
The importance of data privacy
Before focusing on specific data privacy tips, let’s examine the most essential reasons to keep sensitive data secure.
- Keeps your data confidential: implementing data privacy policies and controls protects sensitive information that provides your company with a competitive edge, such as research findings, intellectual property, and other proprietary data
- Protects PII: strong data security measures safeguard the personal data belonging to your employees, vendors, partners, and customers
- Ensures regulatory compliance: the exponential increase in digital data has led to the introduction of privacy regulations like GDPR, SOC 2, and PCI DSS, which are designed to protect the privacy of consumers whose data is collected by companies. Implementing the appropriate cybersecurity measures is essential for complying with the various data privacy regulations determined by an organisation’s geographical scope and industry.
- Helps maximise profitability: data breaches take time and resources to contain, potentially causing interruptions to normal operations and taking personnel away from revenue-generating activities. Additionally, if a supply chain partner or customer’s data was compromised during a breach, you could be liable to pay compensation – in addition to fines if you’re non-compliant with regulations that apply to your organisation.
- Protect your company’s reputation: business relationships are built on trust – and losing a customer’s PII is a surefire way to break their hard-earned confidence in your company. Worse, when word spreads that you’re lax on data privacy, other customers may be loathe to work with you – which could be catastrophic in the long-term.
10 effective security best practices for ensuring data privacy
Here are ten essential security best practice for protecting PII, confidential information, and all other sensitive data.
Develop a data security policy
A data security policy details how your customer and employee PII, confidential information, and other sensitive data should be processed within your organisation. It allows you to formally specify the scope, objectives, expectations, procedures, controls, and responsibilities regarding your company’s data security. To be most comprehensive, a data security policy should have input from all business units, including IT, security, compliance, legal, HR, and operations – with involvement and support from senior management.
An effective data security policy should include:
- How you discover, inventory, and catalogue data, so you know where it comes from, who has access to it, how it’s used, and where it’s stored.
- Your password management policy
- Patch management policies, i.e., the process of updating applications and systems How security teams govern internet, email, and social media usage
- How users should report data breaches and other security incidents
- Your bring your own device (BYOD) policy, i.e.., the approval and authentication process for employee-owned devices
However, developing your company’s data security policy isn’t a one-time, “set and forget” event; you must regularly review and update it in response to insights gained from incident response and as you continue to gather cyber threat intelligence.
Implement a robust password policy
One of the simplest data privacy tips to implement is enforcing a strong password policy, or good password hygiene, within your organisation, which could include:
- Specifying that passwords are of a certain length
- Mandating that passwords include letters (including uppercase characters), numbers, and special characters (_, &, $, etc.)
- Requiring users to change their passwords regularly, e.g., every 30 days
- Requiring users to set different passwords for different applications and systems.
Alternatively, your company can deploy a password management solution that generates unique passwords for each application, stores them, and auto-fills the password field for them when they log in. This then only requires an employee to remember a single master password, while reducing data risk by ensuring they don’t use the same set of login credentials for every app they use.
Only visit secure websites
By only allowing your employees to visit secure websites, you reduce the chance of them unwittingly visiting a phishing domain, a site replete with malware, or one where their data could be intercepted or compromised. Subsequently, one of the most fundamental data privacy tips is to only visit websites with the URL prefix uhttps (hypertext transfer protocol secure) instead of just http, as it means the passes between a device and the web server will be encrypted.
However, instead of relying on users to avoid unsecured websites themselves, security teams can prevent access to suspicious domains websites through tools like a web filter proxy server. These restrict website access according to pre-defined rules, e.g., blocklists or allowlists, and will warn, or even prevent, a user if they’re attempting to access a site without an SSL certificate. Firewalls with DNS-based restriction features can also prevent access to insecure websites. However, because they typically block domains based on IP addresses instead of URLs, they lack the granular control of web content filters.
Ensure your data is encrypted
Another of the most fundamental data privacy tips is encrypting your company’s data – both during transfer and when storing it. Encryption tools employ complex algorithms that “scramble” information, transforming it from plaintext to ciphertext, to render it unreadable. Consequently, if a malicious actor manages to intercept a transmission or breach your IT infrastructure and reach your data stores, they’ll be unable to decipher it, and the data will be worthless.
Protect user devices
Because of their ubiquity, frequency of use, and susceptibility to human error, cybercriminals often target user devices to infiltrate company networks. Consequently, it’s critical to safeguard user devices and protect their sensitive data. A few simple yet effective ways to do this include:
- Always keep locking a device when leaving it unattended: a user who leaves their screen unlocked when stepping away from their desk opens the door for unauthorised personnel to view data to which they don’t have access.
- Install anti-malware software: ensuring user devices have frequently updated malware solutions installed helps protect them from an ever-expanding array of Trojans, worms, spyware, etc.
- Use a virtual private network (VPN): in addition to using a VPN to for remote access, one of the data privacy tips is to use a VPN when using an unsecured network, such as public Wi-Fi. This helps prevent threats such as “man-in-the-middle” attacks in which a hacker sits between a user device and a public network to intercept sensitive data.
Keep user accounts secure
In addition to securing devices in your organisation, securing accounts is vital by implementing access control measures. This enables security teams to authenticate, i.e., confirm that a user is who they claim to be, and authorise, i.e., that they’re permitted access to the resources they’re requesting access to, users before they can access sensitive data.
A widespread method of strengthening authentication is implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA), which requires a person to prove their identity in several ways. This could include:
- Something they know (username and password, PIN code)
- Something they have (a token, mobile app, etc.)
- Something they are (biometric markers, e.g., facial, fingerprint, or retinal scans)
For effective authorisation, security teams often implement role-based access control, whereby users are granted access to sensitive data according to their job titles and responsibilities within an organisation. However, in light of the increasing number of cyber risks they face, especially as they migrate to cloud environments, companies are implementing zero trust network access (ZTNA) for more effective user authorisation. Zero trust operates under the principle of least privilege to grant users the minimal access rights necessary to perform their duties. Subsequently, if a cybercriminal were to get hold of a user’s access credentials or hijack their session, the amount of PII they could access – and, in turn, the amount of havoc they could wreak – would be minimised.
Devise a Supply Chain Risk Management Plan
With your company’s third-party vendors, suppliers, and partners having varying levels of access to your data and assets, your data security posture can only be as strong as the least secure member of your supply chain. Because of this, one fo the data privacy tips is to develop a supply chain (or third-party) risk management plan that identifies the PII and sensitive data your vendors can access and mitigate any data risk to which it exposes you.
Developing a supply chain risk management strategy involves:
- Identifying and inventorying every application and platform that comprises your digital supply chain, i.e., third-party applications. Similarly, you need to assess the value and sensitivity of the data your supply chain partners can access.
- Assessing the cyber security posture of all vendors and partners suppliers, etc. Additionally, determine the severity of the consequences if they suffered a data breach.
- Assigning each vendor a risk rating, e.g., low, medium, and high, and determine the required policies and controls to safeguard the data they can access.
- Communicating your required data security measures to each supplier, in addition to appropriate benchmarks to measure their performance.
- Continually monitoring their data risk mitigation efforts and maintaining an open dialogue on how they can improve their cybersecurity efforts.
Avoid suspicious links
Another of the simplest and most commonly touted data privacy tips is to avoid suspicious links within emails, social media, and text messages. Such links are often part of phishing campaigns through which cybercriminals attempt to extract login credentials and similar PII from a user – or deploy malware onto their device for future malicious action.
However, while “think before you click” is indispensable advice for data privacy, it’s often easier said than done. Social engineering campaigns, like phishing, rely on manipulating human emotions, such as fear and greed, to entice someone into clicking on a malicious link – helping to override their logic and reasoning in the moment. Consequently, it’s also vital for organisations to invest in cybersecurity awareness training for their workforce to educate them on how to identify- and avoid – potentially malicious links.
Keep applications and systems up-to-date
As alluded to earlier when discussing supply chain risk, companies of all sizes rely on an a growing array of applications to bring their products and services to markets. These applications not only process large amounts of sensitive data but also generate it, making them attractive targets for hackers. Worse, it’s common for software to contain exploitable vulnerabilities – which are typically undiscovered by its vendor at the time of release, i.e., a zero-day vulnerability – providing a potent attack vector for cybercriminals.
Because of this, one of the most crucial data privacy tips for a company is establishing a consistent and reliable patch management strategy, i.e., processes for consistently updating their software and firmware. This includes leveraging solutions that automate tracking when updates and fixes become available, in addition to their deployment and management.
Always back up your data
Despite your best cyber risk mitigation efforts – data breaches are inevitable. In light of this, developing a robust backup strategy is critical to ensure business continuity after a cyber attack. Regularly backing up your data allows you to quickly restore your IT infrastructure to a reliable and safe state.
Frequent data backups are an essential element of a disaster recovery plan and help minimise downtime in the event of a data breach, which, ultimately, helps to reduce the cost of a cyber attack. In addition to safeguarding your company against malicious action, a solid backup strategy helps protect against power outages, natural disasters, and human error. Subsequently, it’s wise to make multiple backups of your data, including an off-site backup, to mitigate the risk of onsite backups becoming corrupted or compromised.
How RiskXchange can help improve your company’s data security measures
Our comprehensive cyber risk mitigation platform can help determine the size of your organisation’s attack surface and where you’re most vulnerable to a data breach. We’ll then assist you in devising a robust data security policy that ensures regulatory compliance and best protects your employee and customer’s PII.
Contact us today for your free trial.