By the year 2025, an estimated 463 exabytes will be created daily. For reference, one exabyte is 8,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits. That’s a lot of data. And even though cyber-attacks will increase as the attack surface expands, with cybercrime costing the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, data will remain the most valuable resource for today’s global enterprise.
Much of the available data will fuel innovation across the enterprise, from sales and marketing to IT and HR, allowing the C-suite to make decisions based on tangible information. While data is ubiquitous across all enterprises, some industries that rely most heavily on data and data analytics include:
- Financial: Banks, FinTech, and Private Equity Firms
- Healthcare: Pharmaceuticals, health insurance, and specialized care
- Retail: Grocers, supermarkets, and wholesalers
To unlock the true value of data and enable real-time decision-making, organizations must ensure their data is protected across the enterprise, regardless of industry.
What Is Enterprise Data Security?
Enterprise data security is the processes and tools used to protect an organization’s information from unauthorized access and ensure its digital integrity. The main goal of enterprise data security is to protect data, with special consideration given to sensitive data like:
- Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
- Payment Card Industry (PCI) Information
- Personal Health Information (PHI)
- Intellectual Property (IP)
Existing data protection methods include firewalls, multi-factor authentication, encryption, data masking, tokenization, anonymization, pseudonymization, hardware-based security, and role-based access controls. Data can also be backed up or deleted as needed.
Industries Most in Need of Data Protection
- Financial: Attackers are particularly interested in account and credit data. Several financial data compliance regulations exist, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Nacha, and SWIFT Customer Security Program (CSP) requirements.
- Healthcare: Hospitals and insurance providers store extensive PII and PHI on patients. They must also maintain compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
- Government: Government entities have sensitive data related to extensive citizen information and state to federal-level intelligence. This information is particularly appealing to state-sponsored and international attackers.
What Makes Enterprise Data Security So Critical?
Revenue Loss
While data is extremely valuable to global business, data loss can cost an organization millions of dollars. IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach report underscores phishing, emails, or other messages sent by an attacker that appears to come from a reputable source. This remains one of the top causes of global data breaches and the most costly cause, costing $4.91 million per breach. It was also the number one cybercrime reported to the FBI’s Internal Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2021.
Disrupted Business Operations
Beyond the financial implications, a security breach can disrupt business operations, leading to downtime and lost productivity.
Reputation Loss: Customer Loyalty & Trust
Customers also expect their data to be kept safe. As a result, a data breach can damage your customer relationships and your business’s reputation.
Non-Compliance Fines
Enterprise data security can also help prevent data privacy regulation violations, which can be costly and result in legal sanctions. For example, severe infringements of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the company’s annual revenue – whichever is higher.
Falling Behind in Industry Markets
When data is lost to a breach or when organizations are slapped with a hefty non-compliance fine or lawsuit, a corporation is at the highest risk of falling behind in their markets. That means they can no longer compete or will often have a harder time recovering, taking years to be a serious competitor in their industry again.
Creating an Enterprise Data Protection Strategy
Enterprise data security is a critical component of a cybersecurity defense-in-depth strategy. It’s essential to understand your data environment so you can create a data protection strategy based on your organization’s needs. Here are some steps and questions to consider:
- Where are our existing vulnerabilities? Identify your users, devices, and databases; audit any security gaps to locate potential data loss risks.
- What kind of data do we have? Classify sensitive and public data, and determine where your data travels and is stored.
- Who can access sensitive data? Review access levels and ensure data is protected from unauthorized users.
- Are we migrating to the cloud? Cloud security presents new challenges. Whether on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, your data protection efforts must reflect that.
- What is our disaster recovery plan? Prepare for breaches with secure backups and risk-mitigation strategies.
- With what data compliance laws must we comply? Determine regulatory requirements based on industry, location, and data storage policies.
Finding the Right Enterprise Data Security Solutions
Securing the perimeter is no longer enough. Once you have an enterprise data security strategy, you should clearly understand your organization’s data protection needs. The Protegrity Data Protection Platform offers data protection across your apps and integrations, whether on-premise or in the cloud. You can choose the best protection methods for your data, including:
- Pseudonymization: A reversible method that swaps out sensitive data for pseudonyms.
- Dynamic and static data masking: Methods used to cover or mask sensitive data without changing the data itself.
- Encryption: A method of converting sensitive data into code.
- Data tokenization: Replacing sensitive data with tokens.
- Anonymization: An irreversible method used to remove direct identifiers in the data and generalize the information such as race, birthdate, and gender.
With a variety of data protection methods at your fingertips and the transparency to assign protection to specific fields, files, and dashboards, organizations are empowered to advance their protection while scaling in revenue and competition.
Learn why data protection platforms are essential or contact us today for more specific information.