How to Prevent a Data Breach

Data breaches are more than scary; they have the potential to alter the trajectory of your business. When sensitive information is revealed, it can cause significant problems for businesses, governments, and individuals.

A slight, exploitable weakness can lead to a big data leak if it is not appropriately addressed.

Many people do not pay enough attention to contemporary security dangers because they don’t know how they function. This lack of awareness can lead to irreparable damages to customer loyalty, distrust, income loss, and a poor brand reputation.

We'll go through how to prevent a data breach and how it might affect your organization in this post.

How are Cloud Data Breaches Different?

Organizations are increasingly storing data and infrastructure on the public cloud, due to the advantages it offers accessibility for remote works, acts as a backup solution, and provides business continuity in case of hard drive or other malfunctions. Yet, there are worries regarding public cloud data security, how to prevent data breaches, and its accessibility when stored in someone else's data center.

In general, there are three parties engaged in cloud computing:

  • The company that provides cloud services
  • The company that makes use of their services
  • The clients of that company

In the case of a data breach, people implicated might be divided into the following categories:

  • The controller or owner of the data
  • The data holder
  • The subject of the data

The data controller or owner is usually the cloud-based business, the holder is the cloud service, and the subject is the client.

On the other hand, a breach may compromise sensitive data pertaining to the company itself.

For cloud security data breaches, the data owner is frequently held accountable. However, depending on the circumstances and proof available, the data holder (cloud service) may be held liable.

Data owners should thoroughly verify cloud service providers before storing data with them to prevent data breaches

7 Best Practices to Prevent Data Breaches in Cloud Computing

Data security strategies and processes are increasingly commonplace in most businesses, but do not make the mistake of thinking that these ideas do not apply to the cloud.

Many businesses do security checks on their partners, suppliers, contractors, and other third parties. It's also critical to use this strategy with cloud services and to engage IT security specialists to implement additional safeguards.

To ensure your company knows how to prevent a data breach correctly, here are seven best practices to get you started:

  1. Identify Your "At-Risk" Data

    Step one of preventing data breaches is identifying any sites where sensitive data is stored, transmitted, collected, or processed.

    Learning where you keep, transfer, acquire, or handle sensitive data is an important part of the different ways to prevent security breaches.

    You add more places that store, transmit, analyze, and gather data as your digital footprint expands. You should constantly monitor your assets to avoid or limit the danger of a data breach successfully.

  2. Education

    Untrained personnel have been identified as a significant source of security vulnerabilities by many corporations. Reduce your risk and avoid many cloud data breaches by teaching your personnel how to prevent a security breach and follow correct security procedures. Enlist the help of the entire company because individuals who are actively participating feel more accountable and accept responsibility for their actions. Establish security training sessions and ensure that all staff is well-versed in the best practices. Schedule more than one training session every year; plan sessions regularly to ensure that all employees are updated on safe procedures.

    Establish a strategy and reaction process so that staff are prepared for a variety of situations. Finally, do some security tests without disclosing them to verify if your workers take the appropriate precautions.

  3. In-Flight and At-Rest Data Encryption

    One of the most proactive steps you can take to prevent a data breach is to encrypt your data.

    When you encrypt data, you take a legible format and jumble it to make it incomprehensible to others. Even if a bad actor acquires access to your IT infrastructure, the encryption renders it useless.

    When it comes to data in transit from on-premises to the public cloud, encryption is required both in flight and at rest. This includes both data encryption and decryption. In general, we think of data encryption when it is in transit or when it is stored.

    The encryption most people think of when they hear the word is "at rest" encryption. Data that is "at rest" is data that is not in motion and is typically stored on local disks or other storage mediums. Encryption at rest can be accomplished in one of two ways: whole-disk encryption or file-level encryption.

    When data is "in-flight" or moving, it is said to be more vulnerable. Consider the number of "hops" data can take from an on-premises data center to the public cloud across the internet. There might be hundreds of possible points of vulnerability along the data channel. The data stream is encrypted at one point and then decoded at the destination when data is encrypted while traveling or "in flight."

    When considering on-premises to public cloud networks and data connections, an organization that wishes to go a long way toward effectively mitigating or eliminating cloud data breaches must consider both "in-flight" and "at rest" data security risks.

  4. Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) Methods

    One of the ways to prevent data breaches is to use a CASB controlled via an API to secure cloud data. Because of their scalability, API-based CASBs are usually versatile and may be used in both small and big use cases. A CASB's goal is to keep track of network activity and prevent high-risk activities like file downloads and information sharing over the unprotected internet.

    Many cloud companies are beginning to integrate CASBs as part of their standard services for business clients. The CASB system is set up on a per-user basis, so even if a user tries to access data via their own device, the same security procedures will be applied to that device in accordance with the user's permissions. A CASB, according to Computer World, is particularly effective when a firm's security perimeter only extends to the network's edge and data from the company's server is accessible from outside the organization.

  5. Auditing and Monitoring

    Using mechanisms such as CASBs and other resources to monitor and audit all activities and data in the cloud is critical for security in today's public cloud-driven architecture. It's important to know which people, networks, hazardous third-party apps, and devices are accessing a company's public cloud data in order to assess risk and address any security issues that may occur. Having relevant, proactive alerts enabled, which notify system and cloud administrators of security and audit-related events, can also reveal security flaws.

  6. Paradigms of Micro-Segmentation and Limited Access

    Allowing a user "just enough access" (JEA) to the devices and data they need to function is one of the greatest ways to ensure data security. This is an excellent practice to utilize in smaller businesses where the number of users and the volume of data is manageable. However, when the amount of data and the number of employees grows, this system becomes unsustainable without a thorough examination of which users require access to which data and why.

    JEA has the advantage of limiting the region in which a breach can occur. During cloud computing assaults, the data within the breach may be compromised, but the majority of the data and network will be unaffected. Accounts with privileged access are scrutinized more closely in this sort of arrangement since they have access to more of the company's data than other types of accounts. This kind of protection is appropriate for a small organization but can be unwieldy as the company expands.

  7. Backup Public Cloud Resources

    For organizations learning how to avoid data breaches, it’s time to create redundancies. The harder it is to gain access to an organization's public cloud services, the less appealing it becomes as a target. However, no security method is foolproof, no matter how effective today's public cloud security solutions are.

    If a breach occurs, businesses must determine how they will recover. Organizations frequently undertake on-premises backups of essential resources, but they seldom contemplate backing up resources in the public cloud. While public cloud companies boast high uptime and redundant infrastructure, it is still your job to secure your data.

Prevent Cloud Data Breaches with Fusion Connect

The cloud space, like any other frontier, may be dangerous, and knowing how to prevent a data breach is just the start. Any company that wants to keep its data safe must take the required data security and access safeguards. Businesses must consider and strengthen their public cloud security and cyber risk management in today's hybrid cloud settings.

Allow Fusion Connect's managed security services to handle all parts of your solution, including design, implementation, monitoring, and maintenance, to relieve your IT team of the strain.

Contact us today and secure your corporate and consumer data in flight and at rest, closing security weaknesses in the network and supporting regulatory compliance rules with our SD-WAN solutions.

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