Data collection and analytics is on everyone’s mind these days. Companies can collect more data than ever and use it to improve every aspect of their operations.
However, the easier it is to collect data, the more vulnerable that data is. Additionally, most of this data is sensitive and contains confidential information about your business, your clients, and your business partners.
When you have such large amounts of sensitive data that is at high risk of being exposed, it’s like dealing with a ticking bomb that’s ready to explode.
Unfortunately, many businesses are completely unprepared for such a disaster. Here are some of the common mistakes they make when it comes to data protection.
Thinking it won’t happen to you
You might be thinking: “Sure, the stakes are high but what are the chances that it will happen to me?”. Many have fallen into this trap.
But if it does end up happening to you, you’ll realize that the cost of investing in data protection would’ve been much lower than the costs of recovering from a data breach. IBM’s Cost of Data breach report 2020 shows that the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million. Also, once hit with a data breach, companies take 280 days on average to recover.
However, if you don’t think your business is above the risk of a data breach and you develop an emergency response plan in advance, you can significantly lower these costs. Companies with incident response teams save $2 million, while those with fully deployed security automation save $3.58 million on average.
Hopefully, these numbers will convince you that it pays off to invest in protecting your data, and that, even if it doesn’t happen to you, the stakes are too high to justify taking the risk.
Failing to meet compliance
In the past few years, we’ve witnessed many large-scale data breaches that have shown us just how vulnerable data is to cybersecurity threats and left everyone wondering if there’s anything they could do to improve their data protection strategy. Naturally, what followed was the tightening of data protection laws.
Businesses deal with large amounts of sensitive data on a daily basis, from information about clients and business partners to internal business data. Most of this data is highly sensitive and needs to be protected.
That’s why there are strict regulations regarding business communication records. Depending on the industry, type of business, and your location, you might be required to keep your business emails up to 7 years. To make keeping your email records easier, look for email archiving solutions that will help you set up retention periods according to industry standards and automatically expunge emails once this period expires.
Besides email compliance, make sure that your cloud storage, CRM software, or any other tool you’re using to collect and store information is in line with relevant data protection laws as well.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t follow compliance only to get a passing grade. Often, companies that are just looking to meet a compliance target are opting for shortcuts that can potentially jeopardize their data. Instead, focus on achieving long-term security goals and try taking an extra step to make your data more secure even if it’s not technically required.
Not educating your employees
The human factor is one of the biggest risks when it comes to data loss. Sure, your IT team is probably familiar with the latest cybersecurity trends, but what about other departments?
Most of your employees are completely unaware of security risks and they can easily end up exposing your sensitive data by accident. That’s why it’s essential to educate your employees and create a strong cybersecurity culture in your organization.
Unfortunately, the lack of information isn’t the only factor that makes your employees a serious danger to your data. Sometimes, employees are more than aware of the importance of data protection, but have ill intentions and want to expose them on purpose.
Treating data protection as a project
When it comes to data protection, you can’t just set it and forget it. You need to develop a comprehensive strategy, and then continuously monitor its performance, tweak it, or even develop a completely new one if circumstances drastically change.
The truth is, data protection is not a project. Data is too dynamic and ever-changing, so you can’t rely on the traditional project management mindset if you want to protect it. Data protection is more of a series of projects and you can never really “finish it”.
There are many different steps you can take to make your data more secure and you shouldn’t skip any of them. In fact, you should treat each of them as a separate project that requires the full attention of your cybersecurity team and continuously work on improving these strategies.
Hopefully, this article will help you avoid making these common data protection mistakes and help you improve your cybersecurity strategy.
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