Proactive Measures for Data Security: Remediative Steps to Prevent Data Breaches

From financial loss, and reputational damage, to legal consequences, there’s no denying a data breach will leave its mark on a company. While it's impossible to eliminate the possibility of a breach completely, implementing security measures proactively to reduce your data exposure can minimize the risks of such an event. Below, you have essential remediation steps to safeguard your organization's data.

SPECIFIC REMEDIATION STEPS TO MINIMIZE DATA LEAKS AND DATA BREACHES

CONDUCT SECURITY AUDITS AND RISK ASSESSMENTS

Conducting security audits is the most important step you can take, and it starts with establishing what sensitive and confidential data means for your business and identifying where it is and who has access to it. Your audits should include vulnerability scanning to see which sensitive data is public or not anonymized, and penetration testing to uncover the weak spots in your system. However, while many organizations rely on compliance audits to ensure their processes and data management comply with industry regulations and standards, real-time data security and privacy assessments and monitoring can streamline and accelerate audits while proactively identifying risks.

IMPLEMENT ACCESS CONTROLS

Based on knowing where your sensitive data resides, including shadow data, and understanding access to this data is the first step to preventing data leaks or mishandling. With this information, you can limit access to your sensitive and confidential data and improve role-based access controls to your cloud files and folders, and implementing multi-factor authentication to access sensitive and confidential information. Don’t forget to conduct regular reviews of the access controls and update them accordingly.

ENCRYPT OR ANONYMIZE SENSITIVE DATA

As a result data discovery and classification of sensitive data, another fundamental step is to encrypt your data both at rest and in transit. Encryption and anonymizing tools are helpful to ensure the safeguarding of sensitive information before it is stored or transmitted, throughout its entire journey, or when used in AI training. 

TRAIN AND EDUCATE YOUR EMPLOYEES

The 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report: Vulnerability exploitation boom threatens cybersecurity, revealed that more than two-thirds (68%) of breaches involve a non-malicious human element. Training your employees to recognize threats, properly manage sensitive data, and understand the importance of data protection, will significantly reduce data leaks and mishandling incidents. Knowing what is and how to recognize phishing scams, providing password management tools, emphasizing the importance of using strong passwords, and offering a platform to report security incidents are key steps for a comprehensive employee security training program. However, threat actors exploit weaknesses such as these to get to one thing: data. Building better practices around data hygiene, storage, and access controls is the layer of defense many organizations need to embrace.

These are the most important remediation steps any company should follow to minimize the risks of a data breach. Preventing such events requires ongoing monitoring efforts, advanced technology, and proactive policies. Don’t forget - the cost of prevention is always lower than the cost of dealing with the aftermath of a breach.

To learn more about how Borneo goes beyond current solutions to help you eliminate your data security risks, please contact us at info@borneo.io or visit our website at https://www.borneo.io.