Enterprise data security is the set of policies, processes, technologies, and frameworks related to protecting all of an organization’s data. Enterprise data security also involves the monitoring and managing of safeguarded data for improved cyber resiliency. The best enterprise solutions for data security will work to prevent an organization from data loss. Either due to a cyberattack, natural disaster, or human error, while also allowing the organization to use all of its data for business insights—without compromising user privacy. Enterprise data security safeguards enterprise data quality by ensuring that only authorized individuals may access and use data and that data accuracy, completeness, and consistency are maintained throughout its lifecycle.
Enterprise data security is important due to the increasing value and vulnerability of data to enterprises. By mining all of their data, organizations can uncover new insights that drive competitive advantage. Yet businesses using legacy point products to keep information for business and compliance reasons often have data silos and unpatched systems that allow cybercriminals to exploit their data for financial gain. For example, complex data environments leveraging multicloud, on-prem, and hybrid software and hardware have more entry-point locations for possible breaches.
The volume of worldwide data is predicted to increase, and with it, global cybercrime damages are expected to leap to more than $10.5 trillion by 2025. Growing data collections and the profits bad actors can make through schemes such as data exfiltration and ransomware to breach and steal valuable information are skyrocketing, demonstrating the imperative for robust data security. A solid enterprise information security architecture empowers organizations to proactively discover ransomware and other cyberattacks, avoiding financial and productivity losses and damaged reputations.
Enterprise data security services are always-on solutions for ensuring that critical data is protected against unauthorized access and use. They also help organizations ensure that their enterprise data is not deleted, exfiltrated, or compromised by viruses or human error throughout the lifecycle of the data. Enterprise security services provide data governance guardrails, including who is able to access, alter, and use enterprise data. Specific enterprise security services often include:
Enterprise security services also help to guarantee enterprise data integrity, making sure that all data pertaining to an organization and its users remains accurate, complete, and untampered with throughout its lifecycle.
Enterprise data refers to any information or data that an organization collects, stores, processes, and uses to conduct its business operation—from employees to customers to partners.
Organizations typically categorize data security into two main types: hardware and software security. Hardware security protects the physical components of an organization’s systems, while software security protects the programs and operating information of the organization’s systems. Though the two types are both responsible for the securing of enterprise data, software tends to pose a greater risk for security issues, and thus, an integrated approach to securing both types is optimal. To that end, hardware can be built with specifications for access, authentication, and encryption, but it is up to the software to determine the standards, architecture, and compatibility of an organization’s systems to run securely.
An enterprise security framework is an IT architecture designed to help organizations keep their data safe. It features documented processes, including policies and procedures, for the creation, protection, and management of enterprise data. Among the most widely accepted and used frameworks are the U.S. NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the CIA Triad.
Organizations will often customize the enterprise security framework to meet specific business or industry needs.
The NIST framework covers these five key business data security areas: identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.
Using the CIA Triad, organizations establish systems and protocols to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their systems and data.
Confidentiality and integrity ensure that systems and data are not accessed, disseminated, or tampered with unless strictly authorized, typically through multifactor authentication, encryption, and role-based access controls. Availability ensures that authorized users can access systems and data before, during, and after any sort of cyber incident.
An information security management practice is designed to mitigate risk. It protects a business and its data from threats such as ransomware, natural disasters, insider threats, and human errors. Information security management practices ensure that enterprises construct architectures that anticipate and protect against threats, rapidly detect anomalies, and swiftly restore systems and data after downtime. Information security management practices take into account an enterprise’s adopted security framework and strategy to equip the organization with the best platforms for data management and security.
Data security has become a board-level concern for most organizations. Without a comprehensive enterprise information security framework, businesses are at greater risk of downtime and data loss. Because data now drives competitive advantage, it is transforming every profession and industry. At the same time, cybercriminals know its value and are finding increasingly innovative ways to attack and hold it for ransom. A robust data security strategy mitigates risk by empowering an enterprise to protect its data and achieve its service-level agreements (SLAs).
An enterprise data strategy is a comprehensive vision for an organization’s data management and security decisions. Its policies guide the organization in creating its security architecture and procedures to safeguard its data. The adopted security framework should support the enterprise data strategy and integrate with a variety of partner solutions to best protect, monitor, and restore data in the event of an attack, insider threat, or disaster.
The Cohesity Data Cloud is a modern data security and management platform incorporating Zero Trust principles such as MFA, RBAC, Quorum, auditing, and continuous monitoring with AI/ML to take data protection to the next level. Cohesity combines these data security services with third-party extensibility to seamlessly integrate with existing security solutions that protect against cyberattacks, insider threats, and disasters. Cohesity not only reduces the blast radius of ransomware, it offers organizations a data isolation solution through a cyber vault managed by Cohesity.
The Cohesity platform reduces attack surfaces by consolidating point data management products into a single data management platform with one UI for simplified management at scale. Cohesity uses frequent backups to ensure the integrity of enterprise data and helps organizations keep operating costs low through a pay-as-you-grow model. Finally, Cohesity helps enterprises maintain strong reputations by guaranteeing they meet their SLAs and prioritizing the protection of customer privacy.