How to Avoid Losing Data Analysis (Essay Sample)

How to Avoid Losing Data
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How to Avoid Losing Data
Introduction
The fact that data is a dominant aspect in the modern era makes technology and information increasingly important. From business intelligence to analytics and digital marketing, many aspects of everyday life depend on a steady flow of information. The need to store vast amounts of data has become a priority for many organizations in different industries. They struggle to organize, quantify, and utilize it in decision-making and other essential business practices. With all that data from both internal and external sources, it is evident that corporations would like to protect it. Apart from being a frustrating problem, data loss can prove to be very costly for individuals and businesses alike. Regardless of their sizes, corporations often keep sensitive and personally identifiable information that may be valuable to third parties. Companies are legally responsible for protecting this data. Also, it is in the firm's best interest from a customer and financial trust standpoint. If an unexpected event occurred and caused loss of data, it could cripple the daily operations of a company.
An analysis of the Proposed Data Loss Prevention Solutions
A significant majority of organizations have no plan in place to prevent a data loss emergency. Organizations that regularly collect, process, or store data, must have effective strategies to avoid such crises. Data loss prevention uses different tools and procedures to ensure that sensitive data is not misused, lost, or accessed by unauthorized users. The proposed data loss solutions for different data classes help corporations manage data-handling behavior, identify the risks in their business environment, and patch leaks promptly. Considering that sensitive data loss prevention is a primary concern in the business world, these solutions can provide efficient security techniques and approaches to help companies prevent sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands.
When designing these solutions, data is classified to help individuals identify the kind of data they have, how confidential it is, and where it is located (Wüchner & Pretschner, 2012). Data classification is embedded into data loss prevention solutions to help protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. To avoid data loss, organizations must be familiar with several things like the kind of data they have, compliance governed, intellectual property, individuals with access to the firm's data, and their data rights.
Data is classified into a set of levels by their importance to prevent leakage. The public classification is the lowest data level, entailing non-sensitive data available to the public. The medium-level information or the private category is the second category. Authorized employees or other organizations can access this information. Sensitive data, a high-level data classification, consists of very confidential information restricted to a limited number of employees within a company (Arbel, 2015). The data is not availed to all employees or individuals outside of the firm for safety reasons.
The data protected by these solutions includes sensitive corporate data such as financial, legal, business, HR, and compliance information; intellectual property including project plans, process documentation, patents, trademarks (Wüchner & Pretschner, 2012). Confidential information also comprise of source code, and design documents; as well as personally identifiable information like credit card information, a full name, telephone number, end-user logins, social security numbers, and Protected Health Information (PHI).
A comprehensive data loss prevention assessment helps in discovering a particular corporation's network, and identifying all the non-public data at rest, at the back end, or in motion, preventing exposure to unapproved sources (Fennelly, 2012). Conducting an audit is the first step for planning, designing, and deploying these solutions and aims to identify sensitive data with a business environment, including WAN, LAN, cloud, and VPN sites. It evaluates how well these data loss prevention solutions fill the security gap in comparison to risk avoidance.
Propositions Provided by the solutions
Concrete solutions will play a crucial role in the overall data security system framework. They can be integrated into the existing systems and technology infrastructure to provide an exhaustive, effective, and holistic information security strategy within an organization. These data loss protection solutions depend on various protocols that manage authorization and authentication. Authentication determines users' identity, while authorization regulates the specific resources a user can access.
Protection of data in the various classifications is attained through different techniques such as contextual security data analysis, deep content inspection, and a centralized control framework. The solutions are designed to detect and ward off unauthorized access, transmission, and use of confidential data (Arbel, 2015). Typically, they act as layers between users requesting access to the resource and the system or servers authenticating the request.
Assumptions, biases and fallacies addressed by the solutions
Using a comprehensive data loss prevention solution provides an efficient approach for addressing some of the common assumptions, biases and fallacies regarding data prevention and risk mitigation. For instance, when using conventional data loss contingency tools, most organizations assume the different aspects of personally identifiable data like IP addresses. Missing essential information that may not be directly considered as 'personal' can risk a company's data (Costante et al., 2016). The solutions ensure equivalent control for both the on-premise and cloud portion of the organization's network.
Another common logical fallacy made by corporations is that the solution provider will take care of the essential security functions such as identity and authorization management, backups, and firewalls. The fact is that organizations must take a holistic data security approach to safeguard their data spread across different repositories.
Deliverables Provided by these Solutions
Most business organizations in different sectors worldwide do not have sufficient resources or technical staff to support the intensive efforts of deploying suitable security measures within a stable strategy to manage data loss effectively. These solutions combine the functionalities and features of a data loss prevention system with other security tools to help companies manage this problem from its roots. The remedies are based on the achievement of different layers of defense.
The First Layer of Defense
The First Layer of Defense entails protecting sensitive data in a company. Endpoint protection ensures the safety of entry points of all end-user devices. These solutions include prohibiting unnecessary applications like FTP clients, wireless network connections, unauthorized email clients, and instant messaging services. Companies should use powerful anti-malware solutions to block different spyware programs that hackers may use to steal sensitive organization data (Takebayashi et al., 2010). Also, management of access operations to all portable devices and ensuring security policy compliance is imperative.
Gateway protection strategy is the second solution for the protection of the first layer of defense. Gateway protection strategy includes the use of various security functions in preventing sharing of confidential information with unauthorized persons (Shabtai et al., 2012). These include monitoring and regulating users from accessing certain sites, preventing upload or download of certain data files, controlling unauthorized use of FTP traffic and instant messaging, periodic verification of web traffic, as well as accurate scanning of email contents
The Second Layer of Defense
Even with the best data leakage solutions on the market and information security policies in a company, it is possible to lose sensitive organization data or have it leaked accidentally or intentionally. As such, encryption or the second layer of defense is crucial. Data encryption is one of the conventional data loss prevention techniques that is effective in protecting data when moving from one place to another. To secure confidential data and devices, companies need to conduct full disk encryption for all computers, encrypt email content, and ensure that sensitive data stored on removable storage devices are encrypted.
Data Loss Prevention Software
Data loss prevention software is integrated into the security framework to form a comprehensive security solution. The system uses different agent programs to search through the information under its scope and incorporates several DPL techniques to detect sensitive data that needs to be safeguarded. It also ensures control and compliance of sensitive business data, making sure that users do not send private business information outside an organization's network. Network administrators set the rules regarding who view, edit, or share confidential data (Costante et al., 2016). The system's functionalities often control information both at the endpoint and network level, ensuring that the policies are consistent across the firm. The technologies and tools of this system facilitate data protection, preventing leaks by internal sources.
Duration and Costs
The data loss prevention solutions require less time and effort in early ri...