What is data security?

Data security usually refers to a series of criteria for stopping unauthorized or even illegal access and theft of digital data. The measures for achieving that include everything ranging from the security of various software layers to configurations and underlying policies and procedures.

Access controls are all the mechanisms limiting who can have access to data and what they can do with it. This involves user authentication together with determining who can be allowed to read and write specific data.

Encryption lies in having utilization of sophisticated algorithms and encryption keys to have transformation of plain text data into a form unreadable without the correct decryption key.

Data loss prevention (DLP) is usually used for preventing users from sharing data with those persons outside the organization, either accidentally or intentionally. It is through automatically detecting sensitive data that DLP systems go even further.

In spite of the fact that there are many other ways to protect your organization’s data, other information security measures including on-premises physical security controls, network and web security, or disaster recovery and business continuity are typically not included in the definition of data security.

Why is data security important?

With time going, data security is becoming more and more significant for all types of organizations. Despite the fact that data security was regarded as a lower priority only about ten years ago, many businesses now consider it a requirement for market survival. Here are some of the reasons why data security is of great importance today:

Global digitalization

Data previously stored in diverse ways is now all stored digitally. In spite of the fact that digital systems were initially concentrated on simple text and numbers, almost every document is now processed digitally, making businesses attach great importance to data.

Global accessibility

It seems really close to us that data was stored in server rooms in the back of company offices and obtained through local network computers. This now seems a little outdated, with data primarily hosted in massive data centers in the cloud and accessible from anywhere through the Internet.

Increased sensitivity

With new technologies and applications penetrating deeper into our lives, digital systems can save increasingly sensitive data. It’s not just our passwords or security codes; it could now be our entire gene sequences or detailed medical history.

The age of digital crime

The expanded scope, depth, and value of data are beneficial for not only us and the businesses we have collaborations with but also criminals. Criminal organizations don’t organize elaborate bank robberies any longer. Instead, they find your digital vulnerabilities, perform cyberattacks, steal your information, and sell it on the black market to the highest bidder, who will use it against you.

It is because of the importance of data and the importance of data security in today’s world that no organization can run well without a comprehensive security approach giving priority to data security.

Benefits of data security

Under the backdrop of today’s plethora of cybersecurity approaches, some would hold the viewpoint that data security does not merit being treated as a separate discipline. Today’s integrated email security solutions, for example, may involve measures detecting and blocking attempts to send sensitive data through a certain protocol. Nevertheless, taking this approach to data security weakens its essence and makes it very easy to neglect major gaps.

Data security vs. data privacy

The terms data security and data privacy are closely connected, but they are often confused and misunderstood by people. While, as mentioned above, data security is concerned with protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access and theft, data privacy is associated with safeguarding the interests and rights of individuals of whom the data is being collected, processed and even changed. Although the two concepts are related and frequently overlap, the implementations of data security and data privacy show complete differences.

For example, consider a healthcare professional collecting and preserving patients’ personal data alongside their health information and detailed medical records. Protection of the records’ availability, confidentiality, and integrity would be the main purposes of data security methods. For instance, the service provider might utilize access controls to ensure that only authorized personnel can read the records or use encryption to protect the data from unauthorized access.

On the other side, data privacy regulations would focus on having regulation of the ways that data is gathered, used, and shared. To guarantee that the data is only accessed and released in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the provider may, for example, get the patient’s agreements before collecting and retaining their data, give notice of the ways the data will be used, and adopt policies and procedures.