In the era of digital transformation, businesses must move quickly to take advantage of new opportunities. This need for speed often comes at the expense of security, this can put sensitive information at risk.
In today’s business world, data is everything. And with the never-ending stream of cyber threats, it’s more important than ever to protect your company’s sensitive information. While you can never be 100% secure, there are several security practices you can put in place to minimize the risk of a data breach.
In order to protect your business’s sensitive information, you must implement security practices at all levels of your organization. This includes physical security, network security, and employee training. By taking these measures, you can ensure that your business’s information is safe from threats.
Here are some best practices to protect your business`s sensitive information.
1 Appoint a Data Protection Officer
A data protection officer (DPO) who is independent and answers to the board must be appointed by organisations that process or handle considerable amounts of personal data. The DPO’s main responsibility is to make sure the organisation handles all its data subjects’ personal information properly and in conformity with data protection regulations, including workers, clients, suppliers, and any other individuals. This involves training staff members involved in data processing, educating the company and its workforce about compliance, keeping track of all data processing operations, and performing routine security audits. Additionally, the DPO serves as the company’s point of contact with any supervisory authorities.
2 Classify All Data
A company must be aware of the data it has to secure its secrecy, safety, and accessibility. Make a data inventory so that stakeholders can classify the data properly and better understand the value and quality of the data they oversee. When data has been identified as personally identifiable information and defined as such, it is simpler to verify that security and privacy protections are sufficient and acceptable.
3 Policy, Procedure, and Process Documentation, Servicing, and Enforcement
For the DPO to know what data is being obtained and why, how it is used, where it is stored and secured, how restricted access is, and how it will be deleted upon request or upon expiration, it is necessary to keep data inventories and data flow maps up to date. To ensure that data is always secured and managed properly, the people, procedures, and systems involved in these activities must be covered by written privacy and data management rules.
How the collection of data from online forms and cookies will be significantly impacted by policies for data collecting permission. Make sure developers and users are aware of the impact of these policies. Additional layers of authentication, authorization, accounting, and most critically, encryption of data while in transit and at rest, must be mandated by policies. The cost of a data breach will be greatly reduced by properly handling data acquisition and encryption.
Vendor contracts may need to be changed to reflect compliance with GDPR standards, including a provision for regular audits.
4 Train Employees in GDPR
Employees must be aware of their duties regarding data security. The organization’s privacy policy and the principles of personal data must be covered during staff orientation and training. Anyone who handles or processes data should be aware of their responsibility for maintaining data security and be familiar with the related rules and practices. To keep your privacy knowledge up to date, hold periodic training sessions.
5 Monitor and Audit GDPR Compliance
To demonstrate compliance with GDPR, businesses must perform routine audits of their privacy protection procedures. It is necessary to maintain current records of all data that is stored, how it is processed, information on any data transfers to other nations, and how it is protected. Regularly conduct risk analyses to identify if data processing procedures, supporting documentation, and privacy rules require upgrading. Of course, the IT infrastructure’s security must be updated on a regular basis.
6 Test Data Breach Response Procedures
A local data protection authority (DPA) must be notified of a data breach that potentially affects data subjects within 72 hours. Affected subjects must be informed “without undue delay,” according to GDPR. Test breach management processes and reply to data subject inquiries regularly to ensure sure staff members can fulfill these dates. It should be obvious who is responsible for informing the DPA and customers, and they should be aware of how to detect and report a data breach internally.
7 Complete a Privacy Impact Assessment
Perform a privacy impact assessment before data processing starts (PIA). Risks that lead to potential from the collection, use, and handling of PII should be identified by the PIA. This is a crucial part of the GDPR’s privacy-by-design strategy for handling data. Additionally, it is a useful exercise for adding data security and privacy into system and operation design. The entire organization will need to collaborate because each department will handle, process, or use PII in a different way.
Threat modeling will identify security problems for this data, but a PIA also must assess each action’s level of privacy risk and identify those that pose a significant risk.
The following are the ways that privacy risk is defined:
- An individual’s reasonable expectations of privacy not being met, such as when superfluous information is collected.
- Having failed to get permission before collecting their data
- There is no way for users to refuse or request that their data be removed.
GDPR mandates a security risk assessment for compliance if the PIA reveals a high risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects.
Conclusion
These seven best practices serve as the cornerstone of a project that complies with GDPR and protects the processing and transfer of personal data. They are not, however, unimportant jobs that may be lightly checked off. A sufficient and flexible data management plan won’t necessarily be produced by implementing the fundamental controls required to comply with GDPR standards. Compliance is a continual activity rather than a one-time event.
A more secure IT infrastructure is produced by investing in GDPR compliance, which also indicates to customers that a company takes data privacy and security seriously.
