Data Security Explained: Challenges and Solutions

Data is the most valuable asset for any organization, regardless of size or sector. Loss or corruption of financial reports, business plans, and intellectual property can bring even a global enterprise to a standstill. Moreover, a wide range of compliance regulations mandate the organization protect information in accordance with data security best practices.

In his recent article, Craig Riddell, Field CISO NAM at Netwrix, explains why data security is a top concern for organizations today and offers solutions that can address your most pressing data security challenges.

What is data security?

Data security, or information security, is the use of various types of controls to safeguard content in both electronic and physical form. A detailed data security definition involves the three foundational principles known as the CIA triad:

Confidentiality — Organizations need to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Security measures include access control lists (ACLs), encryption, strong password policies, multifactor authentication (MFA), configuration management, and monitoring and alerting.

Integrity — Data needs to be safeguarded from improper erasure or modification. To verify content authenticity and secure transactions, many organizations use digital signatures.

Availability — Information must be available when needed. For example, your financial database must be available for your accountants to process payment transactions. Availability includes data resiliency, which involves ensuring that content can be swiftly recovered in the event of a cyberattack, hardware failure or other adversity.

Why is data security important?

Ensuring the security of data is vital for a wide range of vital business goals, including the following:

Ensuring operational continuity — Data security protection helps prevent disruptions to business operations that can result from loss of data confidentiality, integrity or availability.

Reducing financial risk — Data breaches can have severe financial repercussions beyond business disruptions, including legal fees, compliance fines and long-term revenue losses due to damaged customer trust.

Meeting legal and compliance obligations  — Failure to comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA can result in hefty fines and lasting reputational damage.

Protecting intellectual property (IP) — Robust data security helps organizations safeguard their financial plans, designs, trade secrets and other valuable information from falling into the wrong hands.

Which data needs protection?

Both enterprises and smaller organizations have to protect two major types of data:

Business-critical data comprises the data assets needed to operate and sustain your company. Examples include financial plans, contracts with suppliers, inventory, and intellectual property like designs and trade secrets.

Private information includes the company’s employee HR and payroll data, customer profiles, personal medical information, and credit or debit card data.

However, organizations cannot afford to waste resources trying to safeguard every file and folder, whether it contains critical intellectual property or just pictures from the company picnic. Rather, they need to be able to protect information assets in accordance with their importance and sensitivity.

How do organizations protect data?

Organizations must employ a range of controls to safeguard information. Common types of data security measures include:

Authentication — Every data security system needs to ensures that individuals accessing sensitive information are who they claim to be. While passwords have long been used for authentication, organizations are adopting multifactor authentication (MFA) to thwart adversaries in possession of stolen credentials by requiring an extra form of identity verification, such as biometrics.

Access control — Authenticated users should be able to access only the data and other IT resources they need to do their jobs. Access control lists (ACLs), role-based access control (RBAC) and privileged access management (PAM) are examples of access controls.

Encryption — Encrypting sensitive information ensures that even if unauthorized access occurs, the data is unreadable. Encryption can secure data both in transit and at rest.

Data erasure — When data is no longer needed, it should be deleted in way that prevents its recovery. Complete data erasure is particularly crucial when retiring or repurposing hardware.

Data masking — Data masking conceals specific data so that databases can be used for testing, analytical or other purposes without compromising data privacy.    

How Netwrix Solutions Can Help

Netwrix offers a suite of data security solutions that empower organizations to dramatically reduce the risk of data breaches and to swiftly detect, respond to and recover from security incidents.

Netwrix Auditor helps organizations detect security threats, ensure compliance and enhance IT team efficiency. A central platform enables auditing and reporting on many key systems, including Active Directory, Windows Server, Oracle Database and network devices. Real-time alerts on threat patterns enable quick response to malicious insiders and compromised accounts.

Netwrix Enterprise Auditor automates the collection and analysis of the data you need to answer the most difficult questions you face in the management and security of dozens of critical IT assets, including data, directories, and systems. Enterprise Auditor contains over 40 built-in data collection modules covering both on-premises and cloud-based platforms from Operating Systems to Office 365. Leveraging an agentless architectural approach, our proprietary AnyData collector provides an easy, wizard-driven interface for configuring the application to collect exactly the data needed, enabling fast, flawless, lightest-weight possible data collection from dozens of data sources.

Netwrix Data Classification identifies content across on-premises and cloud data stores and ensures accurate classification through advanced technologies like compound term processing and statistical analysis. Predefined classification rules simplify compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. The solution also provides automated risk remediation and detection of redundant data.

Netwrix GroupID simplifies user and group management in Active Directory and Entra ID. Features like dynamic group membership, automated user provisioning and lifecycle enforcement enhance security by reducing manual errors and ensuring up-to-date directories.

Netwrix Password Reset enables users to securely reset or change their passwords and unlock their accounts themselves, anytime, anywhere. It also provides password change notifications, multifactor authentication (MFA) and comprehensive auditing to enhance security while saving time and reducing IT service desk costs.

Netwrix Privilege Secure dramatically reduces the risk of compromise or misuse of privileged accounts, including service accounts. Customers can replace risky admin accounts with just-in-time temporary accounts with just enough access for the task at hand. The solution also delivers real-time session monitoring and video recording to ensure accountability and facilitate investigations.

Netwrix Threat Manager speeds threat detection and response with real-time alerts, automated response, deception tools, easy integration with other security technologies and machine learning (ML) capabilities.