9 Data Security Best Practices to Prevent Breaches
Just about every day we see another headline about a data breach. One of the more unfortunate parts about this seemingly endless news cycle is that in many cases, these incidents are entirely preventable.
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While there has never been more urgency to safeguard sensitive information, there has equally never been a more opportune time for it. Cutting-edge technologies make sound data security best practices easy to implement and maintain – and when done right, without impacting employees’ day-to-day routines.
Here are 9 data security best practices your enterprise can use to prevent breaches:
- Employee Awareness Training
- Data Discovery and Classification
- Eliminating Shadow IT
- Using Multifactor Authentication
- Maintaining Regional and Industry-Specific Compliance
- Monitoring Insider Threats
- Preventing Data Theft in Outbound Email
- Protecting Users and Data on the Web
- Unifying Cloud, Endpoint and BYOD Data Protection
Best Practices for Data Security
- Employee Awareness Training
The best employee awareness training keeps pace with the changing threats and risks the security team faces.
Do your users understand what data can be accessed on unmanaged devices, or do they know the best way to give contractors access to private web apps or sensitive data? Educating the workforce on data security hygiene can make it easier to roll out more sweeping changes on the technology front.
- Data Discovery and Classification
You can’t protect what you can’t see. With the amount of data organizations hold reaching petabytes, manual discovery and classification of all that data presents a challenge in its own right.
Artificial intelligence can help level the playing field through automation, enabling organizations to run continuous data discovery with highly accurate classification that improves as time goes on.
- Eliminating Shadow IT
If users are storing data outside of your purview, you’ll have a near-impossible time securing it.
Cloud Access Security Broker technology helps enterprises maintain continuous control over data in 800,000+ applications and allows administrators to extend existing policies to the cloud with just a few clicks.
- Using Multifactor Authentication
Multifactor Authentication (MFA) has become more common in recent years, it can’t be excluded here. After understanding what cloud applications are in use, ensure users have MFA set up for each of those apps to stop compromised credentials from leading to compromised data.
- Maintaining Regional and Industry-Specific Compliance
Industry-specific regulations like HIPAA or regional regulations such as GDPR are designed in part as data security best practices, not just to add another check-box item to maintain.
Using pre-built data security policies like the 1,700+ found in Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention yields two important benefits: the confidence that your data is protected to the highest standards, and time savings from not having to painstakingly configure each policy for compliance.
- Monitoring Insider Threats
Zero Trust ensures only the right people have access to the minimum amount of data they need for their job. But what happens when a user’s behavior changes?
Security incidents stemming from insider threats could be purposeful or accidental. The one commonality they all have is that they can be difficult to identify before they happen. RAP helps enterprises stay one step ahead of their employees with real-time policy adjustments that can be set to self-educate users who make a mistake or block more nefarious threat actors.
- Prevent Data Theft in Outbound Email
Email remains the #1 source of data theft from organizations. However, existing data security policies can easily be extended to cover this channel with tools like DLP for Email. It enhances the native capabilities of email solutions like M365 Exchange and Google Workspace and delivers tight control over data in outbound emails.
- Protecting Users and Data on the Web
Web browsing presents a myriad of threats, especially in industries like finance that need to visit potentially risk websites as part of their daily routine to vet a loan or have access to troves of personally identifiable information.
Secure Web Gateway technology helps enterprises extend their data security policies to the web to prevent sensitive information from being leaked. When paired with Remote Browser Isolation, which opens websites in a container to prevent malware, the two can provide a powerful one-two punch of data security best practices.
- Unifying Cloud, Endpoint and BYOD Data Protection
You might be sensing a theme here; maximizing coverage of your data security policies is key, and consolidating management is a boon.
Forcepoint ONE allows organizations to take a policy and apply it to cloud, web, email and endpoint in just a few clicks. Adding to this is the ability to enforce data security policies on both managed and unmanaged devices, ensuring that sensitive information is safeguarded no matter where or how users access it.
Talk to an expert today about how Forcepoint can help your company implement best practices for data security.
