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What is Data Protection? Data Protection Defined with Examples

What is Data Protection?

What is Data Protection?

What is data protection? Our editors answer this question and provide example strategies, methods, and technologies to consider.

Data protection is the process of protecting data from loss, deletion, compromise, or corruption. Since data is the lifeblood of modern, digital businesses, it is an essential piece of the data management lifecycle and can go a long way in ensuring proper backup and recovery. Organizations are spending an increasingly growing percentage of their resources to ensure data protection each year. Various use cases involving data protection are of paramount importance, like protecting customer data and ensuring only authorized users have access to a database.

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What is Data Protection? Data Protection Defined

Data protection is becoming more complex as the number of devices generating data is increasing exponentially. With the advancement in IoT technologies, industrial machines, wearable devices, healthcare devices, and robotics, the data protection process significantly reduces the risk of data corruption, leakage, and compromise. It also enables companies and businesses to respond quickly to the detected threats against data.

Data protection requires operational backup as well as backup and disaster recovery technology and business processes. Data protection has broad scope and scale and is becoming a vital piece of the endpoint security puzzle in enterprise settings. The risk of downtime is just too great. In this resource, Solutions Review editors explore the topic of data protection, first by defining it more deeply, but also by offering example strategies, methods, and technologies to consider for the best chance at success.

Data Protection: Key Strategies

A data protection strategy is a planned effort that is enacted to protect an organization’s data. It helps companies to standardize the security of critical data, ensuring the privacy of the customers and trade secrets. Data protection strategies consist of multi-step processes that provide solutions to implement and manage security measures. There are several key components to implement a successful data protection strategy:

  1. Data Risk Management
  2. Data Access Management
  3. Data Backup and Recovery
  4. Data Lifecycle Management
  5. Data Storage Management
  6. Ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability
  7. Data Protection Standards, Policies, and Procedures
  8. Data Monitoring and Reviewing

The best practices for data protection strategy are to keep the important stakeholder in the loop about ongoing processes on the data, keep monitoring all available data and frequently conduct risk analysis processes.

Data Protection: Legal Compliance Requirements

It is challenging to make regulatory compliance requirements congruent with business objectives if there is no data protection strategy present. Emerging legislation for user data protection further complicates the compliance process. It becomes more challenging with varying state-by-state rules in terms of how companies can process personal information as well. Nations are focusing on strengthening cybersecurity policies through critical infrastructure and modern standards, but it is creating uneven digital privacy expectations due to emerging laws and regulations.

Data protection laws and regulations vary from country to country, and even from state to state. Moreover, new laws and legal requirements are emerging all over. The United States and Europe are the first entites to develop and implement legal requirements. The European data protection law GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was enacted in 2018 while the US has different data protection requirements in different states but a well-known health data protection law called HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) already exists.

The recent California Consumer Privacy Act supports the right for individuals to control their personal information. China had also been enforced a data protection law since June 2017. Likewise, Australia has its own data protection and privacy act (The Privacy Act 1988). Canada has significant legal development in the data protection and privacy arena as well after implementing Quebec, Bill 64, which is a modern legislative provision to protect personal data.

Data Protection: Methods and Technology

Different technologies and methods have been developed and implemented for data protection. These technologies and methods are designed specifically to preserve privacy and protection against any data loss, corruption, leakage, or modification. Effective technologies and methods people and processes to integrate cyber defense into the workflow. Some technologies and methods are discussed below:

Cryptography and Encryption

Cryptography is the art of hiding data or making it unfathomable to unauthorized or unintended users. Encryption technology obfuscates clear text by scrambling the characters. There are different encryption methods widely used like AES, DES, and RSA. Encryption prevents unauthorized disclosure of data.

Access Management

This technology ensures data integrity by limiting access to digital assets. It defines roles and access rights to the individuals that are checked while individuals accessing data. If these assigned roles and access rights satisfy the conditions then access to the data resources is granted.

Endpoint Security

This technology secure endpoints to provide data protection to network-connected devices. Endpoint protection is essential because the threat of data leakage resides in every device connected to a network. Most of the communication and business functions are executed in the cloud or personal devices in remote work environments. Therefore, protecting every single node has become essential for complete data protection.

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