10 Oct Avoiding a data breach at your company
Worried about a potential data breach? Learn how to clean up your unwanted data and manage it more effectively.
Data security has once again been propelled into the spotlight, this time with a focus not on the hacker, but the organisation who was responsible for managing and protecting the information.
Data is not just an asset, it’s also a source of risk. Leaders have a responsibility to manage on both offensive and defensive fronts – use the data to drive strategic objectives, while also ensuring they safeguard people’s personal information.
But, as the recent Optus breach shows us, data management is not always up to scratch, even in large and technically advanced organisations. In this instance there are significant regulatory penalties, huge remediation costs (the average cost of a data breach in 2021 was $4.24 million) and worst of all, painful reputational damage.
Thankfully, there are ways to combat this. If you want to keep your company out of the headlines for the wrong reasons, reviewing your data governance maturity and assessing your sensitive information exposure is a great way to start.
Let’s dig into how InfoCentric helps protect businesses from the pain of data breaches.
Understand and treat your data exposure
InfoCentric can help you scan your environment for sensitive (PII) information, with a specific focus on your unstructured data estate – documents, cloud folders, network drives and more.
We’ll help you quickly identify PII and highlight data that should be remediated (think Medicare numbers used only for identity verification). We’ll also help you identify those folders and teams that are the greatest sources of risk exposure.
The challenges of managing sensitive data
While cleaning up your data is a prudent short term fix, the problem of data breaches is unfortunately only going to get worse.
Managing information is a challenging task. The best way to approach it is to build maturity across the information lifecycle. Everything from only collecting relevant information, to knowing how to store it, the right mechanisms to share it, and when to dispose of it.
InfoCentric’s InfoSure service, looks at strengths, weaknesses and opportunities across the data lifecycle to help you identify key PII risks, and best deploy your resources to manage them.
For instance – how well does your organisation practice data ownership? Do data owners know their obligations? Are they aware of the sensitivity of the data and what it is used for? Do they have the skills to actively manage the risk? How well is this consistently achieved across the organisation?
Those are all big questions. The next question is – how do you get better at it?
Evolving your data privacy
The combination of a sensitive data scan, remediation process and approach, and a data governance maturity assessment is a great basis for data governance maturity uplift. A clear roadmap is provided – based on both quantitative and qualitative results – to help you manage your exposure (not to mention allow you to use data more effectively to grow and improve customer satisfaction).
We’ve helped dozens of organisations across almost every industry mature their data management capability. Using our tried and tested methods and proprietary scanning IP, we can help you too.
Learn more:
Sensitive Data Scanning: Why is it important?
InfoSure Sensitive PII Data Governance Service
Client Story: Managing the risk of a data breach for a major retailer