Data Protection

Enterprise Data Protection

Why is Enterprise Data Protection Important for Business in 2024?

Data protection and data security have become prime concerns of SMBs and healthcare organizations in the recent past. With attackers becoming more sophisticated and targeted in their ransomware attacks, it is not surprising for SMBs to become conscious about their data protection. Did you know a recent ransomware report released by Datto on 17th January 2023 revealed that SMBs are aware of rising cyber threats and have to allocate resources and invest in cloud and network security?  Here are some of the stats from the report. #Foodforthought: These are some big numbers to Not pay attention to. It flows into the periphery of an organization considering an updated, upgraded, and robust data security plan of action.  With all these stats, it is imperative for SMBs to think about their data security, data protection, and, above all, their data privacy. Simultaneously, it is important to understand the difference between the three and how they all come together to ensure your data is safe and secure. Enterprise Data Protection – Definition And Its Relevance in 2024 If we talk about the definition of EDP- It is the process of delivering, managing, and monitoring security across all data repositories and objects within an organization.  Enterprise data protection is an inclusive term that includes various policies, tools, frameworks, and techniques ensuring your data safety respective of its storage and consumption within an organization. Enterprise Data protection is crucial for businesses for several reasons.  The increased reliance on digital data and technology has increased the need for enterprise data protection. Considering the growing frequency of cyberattacks, it has become essential for SMBs to take proactive measures to amp their data protection, data security, and data privacy strategies. Key components of an effective enterprise data protection strategy Threats to Enterprise Data in 2024 In 2024, the threats to enterprise data are bound to become more targeted and sophisticated, and organizations must guard against them.  So, how do you define enterprise data threats? Simply put, Enterprise Data threats imply all the potential harm that could be caused to an enterprise’s data or systems due to security breaches, cyberattacks, or other malicious activities and subsequent data losses. Some common enterprise data threats include – While all these are common threats to enterprise data, risks of data breaches and cyberattacks have increased. Risks of Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks Ransomware attacks are the biggest and the most common threat to enterprise data, but that’s not all.  Data loss is a huge impact on an organization and the onus of protecting sensitive data increases with each attack.  Ransomware attacks can be identified by keeping an eye on the following activities  2. Impacts of data loss on businesses: The impact of Data breaches and cyberattacks on businesses is quite significant. 3. Importance of protecting sensitive data: Confidential information like personal information, financial information, and trade secrets are your sensitive data that needs protection and security. So, data protection is critical to the data security and privacy of individuals and the business’s success. Let’s look at the impact of enterprise data protection on businesses in 2024 and how businesses should protect their enterprise data from ransomware attacks. Why Is Enterprise Data Protection Important for Businesses in 2024? Enterprise Data Protection is crucial for businesses in 2024 for several reasons: Final Words Enterprise Data protection is a crucial aspect of modern business operations and is essential for protecting sensitive data, maintaining a business’s reputation, and supporting overall business goals.  Rather than scrambling for solutions at the 11th hour, it is better to evaluate the current security systems and invest resources to make EDP a part of the growth of your organization.  To know more about how we can help you battle your woes, please feel free to reach out to us at info@ace-data.com today! 

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Data Loss Prevention (DLP): A Complete Guide

Data loss prevention (DLP) – also known as data leak prevention, extrusion prevention, and information loss prevention – is a stack of strategies, products, techniques, and technologies to prevent unauthorized users from accessing or misusing critical information. It also makes sure the workforce doesn’t send confidential data beyond corporate boundaries. DLP : Data Loss Prevention Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software classifies confidential, regulated, and business-critical information and recognizes policy breaches specified by the organizations or within a preset policy package, usually backed by regulatory adherence, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or GDPR. After identifying those breaches, DLP enforces recovery with encryption, alerts, and other preventive measures to prevent end-users from maliciously or accidentally sharing information that can put the business at risk. The adoption of Data Loss Prevention is scaling up. As per a report, by 2021, 90% of businesses will have employed at least one sort of integrated DLP – up from 50% in 2017. Data Leak Causes Let’s look at some of the most common data leak causes: Device Theft or loss Remote work and the ‘Bring Your own Device (BYOD) models have been useful to businesses – especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic – about upfront expenses and efficiency. But, they can also pose security risks. Employees commuting or working between various locations are more likely to misplace or lose their devices. Malware Attacks Often, cybercriminals kick off malware attacks to fulfill their vindictive goals. Some of the most prevalent ones include RAM scraping, in which the memory of the targeted devices is inspected for gathering critical data. In addition, some malware attacks install tools, such as keystroke logging, to collect keystrokes for stealing passwords or other confidential data. Social Engineering About 25% of data infringements are carried out by utilizing social engineering. Often, cybercriminals act as if they belong to a particular business or organization and later grab confidential details from undoubting users. Also, the fraudsters use WhatsApp messages, phone calls, and even SMS to deceive relevant stakeholders. Weak Credentials 8 out of 10 data infringements occur due to weak or stolen credentials. Passwords that are easily cracked, such as personal details (your pet’s name), or used across numerous websites, will put your data at stake. Outdated Software Out-of-date software makes cybercrime simple for any hacker. Without routine software updates and the latest security patch installs, your devices, and systems won’t maintain the guard they need to block malicious intrusions. How Does Data Loss Prevention (DLP)Work? Data Loss Prevention relies on several technologies (broadly split into two categories, i.e., integrated DLP and Enterprise DLP). The policy violations can be activated through different content analysis techniques. Rule-based/regular expressions is one of the most common analysis techniques, considered as a first-pass filter. It involves content analysis by the engine for specific rules like 16-digital credit card numbers. Database fingerprinting or Exact Data Matching involves looking at exact matches from a live database or database dump. Statistical analysis uses machine learning and other methods to trigger policy violations. Conceptual/lexicon can alert on unstructured ideas using a combination of dictionaries, rules, and more. There are many different techniques now that are effective for different types of inspection, right from pre-built categories to partial document matching. Therefore, when choosing a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution provider, it’s essential to consider, among other factors, the type of techniques they employ, the technologies they use, and whether they have their own content engines or rely on third-party solutions. How to Prevent Data Loss? As data leaks can be quite costly, it’s crucial to invest resources in ensuring they don’t happen. Here are some ways to help you prevent data loss and secure your business from cybercrime: Encrypt Data Leaks End-to-end encryption levels up data protection no matter if the data is in a cloud (public or private), on-site, or in transit. Data encryption provides confidentiality and drives vital security processes, including authorization, authentication, non-repudiation, and integrity. Data Backup One of the strongest defenses in Data Loss Prevention is data backup,especially for ransomware attacks. Devise a data backup plan that can safeguard your business by helping recover the data that has been lost or corrupted. Make sure you have solid backups and offline backups too. For help, consider contacting the third party for managed backup services. Secure all Endpoints Now, with several businesses adopting the remote work model, endpoints have become scattered (at times even internationally), making them tougher to safeguard. Virtual private networks (VPN) and firewalls offer a foundation layer of endpoint security, but they aren’t enough. Often, employees get tricked into introducing malware into an environment to evade these security walls. So, do a thorough audit and develop defined ways to secure all endpoints. Impose Access Control Your business’s critical data can currently be accessed by users who don’t need it. As an early response, you should evaluate all permissions to ensure access isn’t being granted to unauthorized parties. After verifying this, all confidential information should be divided into various sensitivity levels to control access to multiple data clusters. Only trustworthy employees with essential requisites should have access to highly confidential data. Patch and Update your Software Patching should be a core part of your business’s DLP strategy, no matter if you’re running a large enterprise with many devices and users or a small business with a few devices and software. Software updates help safeguard your data from unsanctioned users or intruders by resolving security loopholes present in the software. Regular software updates protect your business from the threat and effect of data loss – in terms of cost, risk, and severity. Data Leakage Prevention Best Practice Use the following data loss prevention best practices to protect your sensitive information from external and internal threats: Did you know, more than 90% of data infringements happen due to human error? As fraudsters love to exploit unsuspicious staff, you need to offer mandatory cybersecurity awareness training for your workforce. Data classification helps you control user data access and prevent storing confidential data in unsafe locations thus

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Data Protection

What is Data Protection and Why is it Important?

Data protection is the process of protecting critical information from corruption, compromises, or loss. This includes backing it up on different media so you’ll have access to it, in case of disaster or loss, whether from desktops/laptops servers, etc. The traditional approaches used for data protection and data backup were tapes & disks but now we have cloud-based data backup solutions too! The Data Protection team has many different responsibilities. They make sure that your data is backed up on secondary devices in case of disaster or loss, they keep records about what was done with each backup copy made per client so there are no discrepancies between multiple versions if one gets corrupted while trying to restore from it later- this way you always know how old certain pieces may actually be! Why is Data Protection important? Data Protection is important to protect your data to keep it safe from different forms of threats. The threat of physical hardware failure and infrastructure issues has been there forever. Accidental deletion of data and malicious intent of the user should also not be ignored. The bigger threat nowadays is from malware, ransomware attackers & hackers. They are targeting organizations with the intention of stealing valuable information like credit card details, bank account credentials, etc. They encrypt your data and demand ransom for decrypting the same. In many cases, even paying ransom does not help. Loss of data & delays in rebuilding the same both brings huge losses to your business. Unplanned application downtime has a direct revenue loss. So, there are a few key things to bear in mind when it comes to data protection: Tips for Data Protection – Ensuring you have a robust backup and disaster recovery plan in place is essential. This should cover all your critical data, including any databases, applications, and systems. – Make sure that your backups are tested regularly to ensure they are working as expected and that you can actually restore them in the event of a disaster. – Encrypting your backups is a good idea to protect them from unauthorized access, especially if they are stored off-site or in the cloud. – Keeping your data well organized and tidy will also make it easier to protect and manage. This includes having a good naming convention for files and folders and using appropriate permissions to control access. Following these simple tips will help ensure that your data is well protected and you can sleep soundly at night knowing that you have a plan in place should the worst happen! How to build your data protection strategy? Without a strong data protection strategy in place, your company’s intellectual property and customer information can be at risk. The first step to building this type of plan for yourself or others within the business is understanding how you’re using certain types of electronic records. Classify your data by determining its sensitivity and applying the appropriate protection measures. You need to understand various aspects like frequency of updates, recovery point objective (RPO) & duration time frame for restoring operations after a disaster or attack on system resources has occurred. It is essential that you analyze your risks before they become costly mistakes! There are many ways to protect your data, but you must first understand its sensitivity. To do this, you can classify your data by determining its: –Confidentiality: Is the information private or restricted? –Integrity: Is the information accurate and complete? –Availability: Can authorized users access the information when they need it? Once you know how sensitive your data is, you can apply the appropriate data protection measures. For example, if your data is highly confidential, you may need to encrypt it or limit its access to only a few authorized users. If integrity is a concern, you might create backups & use digital signatures. And if availability is an issue, you might store your data/backups in multiple locations or use redundancy. Let us consider a few examples of data types commonly in use in any organization: The first thing to consider is how often you need your data backed up and whether the limited amount of records being stored on file servers makes this type of backup sufficient. If not, then it’s important that we find ways for organizations like hospitals or law firms with large amounts of patient scans at stake, to maintain continuous data protection against ransomware infections through proactive strategies such as automated data archiving procedures which continuously store information already collected into databases rather than processing daily updates once every hour – even if there isn’t any new input coming in! Online databases: Not all of them hold very critical records or get updated in real-time. For example, an HR application with an attendance and payroll database might only be refreshed once per day for staff members’ arrivals in addition to monthly updates on their paychecks–compared to other types that could go months without any changes at all! Comparing it with ERP & online applications where you don’t know who is updating the data and from where so a slight data loss could be a huge business loss. It’s important to have a plan in place for when things go wrong. This includes having copies of your critical databases remotely replicated so that they can be accessed quickly and with minimal data loss during an emergency situation, like natural disasters or something else unexpected happening at headquarters where you don’t expect it! Online replication with zero time lag is a must in this case. Data gets updated locally and remotely at the same time so in the event of a disaster you can point to the replicated copy with minimum or zero data loss. How does Data Protection work? Backups have been an integral part of any company’s IT infrastructure for ages, but the technology has evolved significantly over time. External tape drives became faster and more reliable as they were improved upon by generations; eventually being replaced with faster disks that

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Continuous Data Protection

Why Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is Important?

Every business has different needs when it comes to data protection. User-created content typically gets backed up once per day while databases are backed up more frequently depending on their RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and some very critical domains require immediate Continuous Data Protection too! With Continuous Data Protection, you can be confident that your data is always backed up at the minimal set period. Traditionally this has been a luxury feature for high-end databases and storage where you are expected to replicate your data online from one location to another. It involved almost setting up the entire duplicate remote infrastructure to take care of this. Not everyone has enough resources to maintain replicated copies of all their data in different infrastructures & environments. The OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) databases were all that mattered to the enterprises, and they replicated only those. Replicating other data would have been costly in both time and money; there is no point in putting more strain on an already overworked system by making it do something unnecessary! These were left to a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of at least a day. CDP (Continuous Data Protection) with Ace Data Virtual Vault CDP isn’t an issue with Ace Data Virtual Vault. The solutions offer seamless continuous data protection/backup. You can configure it down to 2-3 seconds after any change or update is made on the data. The system keeps an eye on the data files & folders and the moment the change is saved, it is processed for backups. The users will never need to worry about losing anything important again because everything gets stored automatically within moments anyway. Virtual vault is a great way to ensure that your files are always backed up. You can enable CDP on specific folders or even just one folder, depending on what you need for safety purposes! The frequency at which backup occurs depends entirely upon how often certain types of changes happen – such things might include newly created documents versus other modifications made over time; photos being added periodically rather than continually captured every day by an automatic system. CDP eliminates the need for a backup window by only backing up data whenever it changes, so you can rest assured that your files are always safe. No need to plan a specific data backup window. You don’t have to worry about scheduling or provisioning any special resources because CDP will take care of all this for you! With Virtual Vault, you can rest assured that your data is safe. The software will automatically pick up any new content as soon as it’s saved and keep an eye on all of those changes for you! Enabling CDP is a checkmark away. Conclusion Virtual Vault Continuous Data Protection is a must-have tool for anyone who stores important data. It’s easy to use, and offers complete peace of mind knowing that you’ll be able to recover any lost or modified files with ease – plus it keeps your system up-to-date!

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