In a recent article regarding the top six data breach trends of 2015, we should expect more breaches in the healthcare industry, legal and regulatory pressure will increase on CEOs and boards, despite headlines involving breaches by hackers and foreign countries disgruntled or negligent employees will be companies’ biggest security threats, hackers increasingly will target data stored in the cloud, credit card breaches will rise over the next few months and the Internet of Things will provide an easy entry point to all your devices and data.
How worried should we be about these trends? Well, let us be honest, this is not so much of a surprise judging by the events of this year. Already we are reaching a record pace for data breaches and what was once only limited to healthcare, retail and finance has strongly made a mark in the government sector as well.
However, to break this trend ultimately, is to protect the data itself. Laws and regulations are now putting a stop to those who do not, “render personal information unreadable, undecipherable or unusable by unauthorized persons.” Encryption is exactly this, and now lawmakers are looking for all organizations that deal with customers’ personal data to abide by these laws to make data secure.
Encryption technology can be used to protect sensitive data. If data is encrypted in sufficient strength it can remain safe even when stolen or lost in any media. It also protects data during transition but it does not prevent the leak after decryption by authorized recipients. Considering most of data leaks are originated from insiders who have or had access to this data, organizations must complement and authorize existing security infrastructures with the solution which can protect data in use persistently.
Every organization needs to rethink how to protect their most valuable data. Protecting it with data-centric security ensures that it’s always safe no matter where it goes. By doing this, all the data breach trends of 2015 will not repeat themselves next year for sure.
Photo credit by: Elizabeth Hahn
