What is enterprise data protection?

Enterprise data protection is a holistic strategy that implements policies for the people, processes, and technology of a large organization in order to prevent data security breaches. With the world becoming more widely networked over wireless networks, and the emergence of extremely mobile storage or computing power via cloud computing and virtualization, enterprise data has become much more vulnerable because it is transferred more frequently and is stored on more devices.

Cyber-attacks, malware, or internal negligence can compromise the business-critical data or private customer data in an organization’s storage devices. Once the security layers protecting data are breached, the data can be corrupted, lost, and/or stolen. The result is commonly a significant cost to the organization to recover corrupt or lost data and compensate any customers that have had their sensitive data stolen. There’s also damage to the image of an enterprise after a security breach.

84% of corporate organizations said they had experienced at least one data breach in the last year, according to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute. 57% had experienced more than one. A 2009 study of fifteen different US industry sectors found that data security breaches cost an average of $6.75 million per incident ($204 per customer). The most expensive data security breach that year cost $31 million. The study showed that breaches from malicious attacks were the most frequent and the most costly. Attack-type breaches doubled from 2008 to 2009, the study says.

Enterprise Data Protection Strategies
Data must be properly organized and managed within a large organization so that sensitive data is not left unprotected. This begins with data classification, which is a way to label data and organize it in such a way that the non-public data is kept away from the public. Employees should also follow good password guidelines to make sure that the authentication technology is as secure as possible. The employees also need to protect the data on their endpoint devices, such as laptops and USB flash drives. These devices can be stolen or attacked in order to gain sensitive data or a way into the organization’s wider network.

On the technical side of the coin, there are a number of general security technologies that can be implemented to protect data. Here are some of the major layers of security:

• Disk and File-level Encryption: This is a form of security that ‘scrambles’ the data written to disk or stored in the file system. Most modern encryptions are very hard to decode into usable data without the key, which reverts the encrypted data back into a readable form. Encryption can also be used in network communications, which are also vulnerable to intrusion.

• Network Intrusion Detection: A network intrusion detection system looks for common cyber-attack patterns and detects an attack before it can do significant damage.
• Authentication: Authentication involves a system of routers, firewalls, and other filters that block access to a system until acceptable identity credentials are entered Once a user is inside the system, the firewalls also regulate resource access depending on your permissions, which are based on your role in the organization. This makes it more difficult to access critical data if an attacker acquires some permissions.

• Securely Coded Applications: Any internally-built applications should adhere to the best security practices when the software is written. Externally-made applications should be updated every time there is a new security patch.

• Backups: These protect data from lost through attacks or negligence. Some security techniques will also allow the destruction of compromised data, so an untouched backup is essential in this case.

A term used to describe various data leak prevention technologies combined with encryption technologies, which are sometimes referred to as data loss prevention. The purpose of this technology is to provide a high level of security for organizations with data loss problems. Using enterprise data protection, security issues are attacked from two fronts – stopping the initial leak of data and also preventing any further leaks. Though no organization can ever stop every single data leak, enterprise data protection goes a long way to ensure all is being done to stop the problem.