9 Data Security Best Practices For your Business

According to IBM, the cost of Data breach was 4.45 million in 2023. This cost has been increasing ever since. Whether you run a small scale business or large one, you will have to face its consequences. Instead of launching an incident response plan, it’s always a good idea to stay protective and employ the best Data Security practice to protect your business data. 

Although there are a number of security methods you can employ, here are 9 most effective Data Security best practices, which allow you to keep your system bulletproof. So, let’s get started and unlock their details.

1-Database Encryption 

You have a large amount of data, some data is in the transit while other is stored or in rest. So, when it comes to protecting the data, encryption plays the biggest role. It is one of the best security practices you can employ.

 Normally Transport Layer Security TLS protocol is implemented in all the data which is in transit. You can easily avoid data loss by encrypting any disk that stores your data. Column-level encryption is certainly the best way to secure sensitive data fields. 

2-Perform Regular Data Audit

One common practice of data protection and security is to perform regular data audits. The purpose of the audit is to separate sensitive data from non-sensitive data. You need to make these identifications to ensure that you protect your confidential and sensitive data at any cost. This audit helps you save your money and resources. 

You will protect only sensitive data and utilize your resources in a cost-effective manner. This audit is a requisite because it allows you to keep your data well-protected and stay compliant to data protection regulations and standards. 

3-Keep Data Protected During Testing Phase

Many times your organization has to face data breach because your data isn’t well-protected during the testing phase. When you are testing an environment, you focus on the test and become less concerned about security, which is a wrong approach.

 The best security practice is to keep the testing environment separate from the production environment. It’s always a good idea to not use real production data during tests. You can employ synthesized data instead as even if a breach happens on the testing side, you won’t have to worry about data theft or loss.

4- Follow Least Privilege Principles

It is one of the most common data security practices where you remain vigilant and kee revoking data access privileges. A user will have access to your sensitive data as long as their daily roles are required, once they don’t need access you revoke access.  You can easily prevent privilege creep problems through this method.

 Your organization faces an issue when you grant some privileges and don’t revoke it. Users get prolonged authorization, which is a big issue. You need to manage access privileges with the best data security software for privilege access management (PAM). These systems come in handy for granting and revoking privileges automatically. You can also grant “just in time” privileges as well. When you have this software, you can check all the privileges throughout your organization on the dashboard.

 It offers a great amount of visibility of all the permissions. Within a click, the system administrator can grant or revoke access to your system. Thereby, everything remains under control and chances of breach minimize to a great extent.  

5-Keep Database Servers and Web Servers Separate

Another data security practice is to follow isolation principles. You need to keep the web and database server separate. In case if an attack happens at one server then your other server won’t get affected.

Separate your web server from your database server to improve security by maintaining isolation and preventing lateral movement. With separate servers, attackers cannot access the database even if they hack your admin account on the web server.  If you keep sensitive programs separate from the database server, you can easily protect your critical data against hackers and attack.

6-Physical Data Security

You can use digital data security software to protect digital data. But what about your physical database? It means you need to employ some physical data security measures. Sometimes, attackers get access to your physical space and launch an attack, which you can’t handle. When it comes to physical database security, you need to designate a specific location which you protect 24/7 through security guards or surveillance systems. 

7-Nonstop Monitoring

You need to use the best data security software that allows you to monitor your database round the clock. This nonstop monitoring makes it easy for you to handle any unauthorized access or non-privilege user from time to time. 

Normally, a system keeps an eye on your database and alerts you if a user shares an account, or when an employee or other users are involved in suspicious activity. Try to invest in the best database activity solution through which keeps regular logs of all the user activities and provides records for investigation. 

8-Perform Regular Security Test

One of the best data security best practices to conduct regular security tests. The purpose of these tests is to identify security issues and find vulnerabilities. You can assess loopholes and tighten them so that no attacker can have any access to your important data and files.

9-Use Strong Authentication

Another best practice to secure your organizational data is authentication. Database authentication is a process where every user or service has to show that they are who they say. Basically, you can’t access the database without going through the confirmation process.

You might be quite familiar with the authorization process where every employee and manager will have different levels of authorization. Management can access all the data while employees will have limited authorization. You can boost the security level by guaranteeing different permissions to different user accounts. 

Another way to optimize data security is to opt for two-factor authentication. It requires all users to enter a Password alongside a PIN sent to their email address and mobile devices

Wrap up

If you want to keep your business well-protected against cyber attack and data breach then you should employ all or a few data security best practices, which I mentioned below. Precaution is better than cure, always guard your system in a way that an insider or outsider can harm your business.