There’s no doubt that we have officially entered the digital age. Nowadays, everything is on the cloud or exists as a soft copy. Few companies and homes still use copious amounts of paper in which to store data. After all, why go to the expense of printing paper, as well as the inconvenience of maintaining the same in storage, when one can just put everything on the cloud?
The issue of data security, however, is one that frequently arises in this modern age. Having everything in the cloud is all well and good. However, how does one protect that data? It’s much easier when we can lock some papers in a safe or keep them in one particular locked cabinet.
But when you can’t see it? When the data is more ephemeral than physical? How does one ensure that data doesn’t disappear or get stolen?
Enter data security. The various data security techniques that we’ll discuss today in this article are what keeps your data safe.
The Importance of Data Security
Let’s take a look at the application of data security in a few different use cases. Firstly, let’s look at the personal use case.
You might have soft copies of your passport, your birth certificate, or some other important documents backed up. You may have started a business, and have a lot of proprietary information that your customers can’t see saved somewhere in the cloud.
If this data is not secure and gets either stolen or lost, there are immense ramifications for you. You have to go through the trouble and expense of ordering new authentic documents in the first scenario. And in the second, your business might fail if your competitors get what you’re trying to keep secret!
In the corporate world, the applications are similar, with one important difference: a lot of companies and organizations store data about their customers and users. Thus, they have a responsibility to their entire user base to keep their data safe. Any data breaches that occur compromise not only the company’s own proprietary info but also the identity and payment info of all their customers.
One can thus see how important data security is to such institutions.
How Does One Secure Data?
There are four different data security techniques that should go into your data security plan.
The first is data encryption. By locking data down with a code that requires a passkey to access, one can ensure that only the right people with the passkey can view and modify the data.
The second is data masking, which hides the data to external sources.
The third is data erasure. By simply erasing all data that isn’t useful anymore, companies can ensure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Lastly, we have data resilience, which entails creating multiple backups of the data and putting them both on physical hard drives as well as in other places on the cloud.
Wrapping Up
With these data security techniques in mind, you now know how to protect the data that you need to keep secure!
For more expert advice, be sure to check out the rest of the articles on the website!
