You likely work in an organization that deals with tons of data. Some of this data could be domain-specific, such as product information in a supermarket – which doesn’t necessarily need protection. However, you also have your private data, such as employee payroll information, which can cause significant privacy issues if exposed within the organization.
Therefore, it’s important to adopt the right measures to protect such sensitive data and preserve the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability).
What is Sensitive Data?
Before managing sensitive data, it’s important to understand what it is. Simply put, sensitive data is any type of data that can negatively impact an organization or an individual if exposed to the public.
This can translate to data such as:
- PII data: full name, date of birth, address, contact information
- Health data: medical history, treatment plan, insurance information
- Business data: bank account information, employee payroll
- Education data: student grades
- Finance information: credit card numbers
All of this data can negatively impact the entity under consideration if such data is unknowingly exposed to the public. For example, if credit card information is exposed to the public, anyone can use this information to make unauthorized transactions on your card.
Therefore, you need to protect such data and ensure that it cannot be wrongfully shared. Depending on the type of sensitive data you handle, you can adopt specific standards. For example, if you’re dealing with health data, you can adopt HIPAA, or if you’re dealing with financial information, you can explore PCI DSS.
By choosing the right framework, you can effectively kickstart sensitive data management in your organization.
Managing Sensitive Data
Managing sensitive data isn’t a one-step process. It’s an iterative approach that aims to continuously improve how sensitive data is managed within an organization.
To do so, you can adopt the following measures:
- Understanding your sensitive data
- Implement strong access controls
- Implement data encryption
- Implement data masking
- Conducting risk assessments
- Regulatory compliance
Phase 01: Understanding Sensitive Data
As we saw earlier, organizations work with different types of data. It’s important to isolate what you consider sensitive and manage it accordingly. This is mainly done to reduce the cost of overall data protection.
Protect only what’s necessary!
For instance, always protect PII, financial, and health information if you’re handling such data, or simply protect what’s considered sensitive within your domain.
Phase 02: Implement Strong Access Controls
After you isolate the data, it’s important to build a strong foundation of access control around your data set. This is mainly done to ensure that only the required people can access the data. For example, a receptionist working in a company doesn’t necessarily need to access company financial records.
Likewise, it’s important to build a strong access control model within your organization when accessing sensitive data. To do so, there are three main models you can adopt:
- Mandatory access control (MAC): With MAC, you can strictly determine who has access to a sensitive document by directly associating a user with a document. However, one drawback is that you don’t have a central point of control to govern access rights.
- Discretionary access control (DAC): With DAC, you can associate access to documents based on the classification of your documents. For example, you might have classified or public documents that different types of people can access. A Classified document would likely be accessible by the C Level, and the public can be accessed by anyone. Based on such policies, you can determine levels of access.
- Role-based access control (RBAC): You can structure your organizational hierarchical chain as roles and provide access to content based on the role the user is associated with. For example, a receptionist may only have access to front-desk-related documents. Likewise, you can determine the right level of access based on your organizational structure and associate access to documents based on the role.
Phase 03: Implement Data Encryption
After you’ve decided who can access what data, you can start protecting your data from breaches. This can be accomplished by encrypting your data when it is at rest. Consider leveraging symmetric encryption techniques to encrypt your data at rest.
By doing so, even if an attacker gets a hold of your data, they won’t be able to understand your data, thus making it unusable for them.
Phase 04: Implement Data Masking
You can also mask data before you store it. This helps in cases where you want to share data with third parties for analysis. You can leverage techniques like anonymization to mask and remove your PII data from your dataset, thus decoupling the data owner from the actual data point.
Phase 05: Conduct Risk Assessments
Next, regular risk assessments should be conducted to identify where the organization currently stands. This can include frequent:
- Auditing: Both internal and external audits can be conducted to determine if the organization is in compliance with data protection standards such as HIPPA, GDPR, ISO, or PCI DSS.
- Vulnerability assessments: Assessments can be conducted on the systems to identify security flaws in internal applications that can leave room for data breaches.
Phase 06: Regulatory Compliance
After you’ve conducted all of the steps above, it’s important to continuously monitor the processes to ensure everything runs smoothly. You will also have to practice data security drills and conduct employee training to ensure that everyone is aware of the security guidelines, processes, and standards that have been set up.
Concluding Thoughts
And, just like that, you can build an effective process for managing sensitive data within your organization! Treat data as a mission-critical asset to your organization. Without data, your organization cannot drive its core business values. Hence, adopt the right data protection standards and the processes stated above to get your team on the right track for managing sensitive data.