In this rapidly growing data-centric and insights-driven tech world, businesses face a daunting challenge: safeguarding confidential and sensitive information while complying with regulations.

Efficient data security & governance policies are crucial to further mitigate the risks, ward off breaches and keep the trust of stakeholders intact.

With each passing day, companies increasingly depend on data-driven decisions, making voluminous data a prime target for cyber threats. With the growing breaches, it is necessary to have a diligently created data security policy in place.

The primary advantage of such a policy is to generate awareness among employees within an organization. From managing data to cybersecurity strategy, the policy includes the methodology for protecting the company’s sensitive data and information.

The policy also helps organizational staff understand their role in protecting the organization’s confidential data.

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Data security is known as the method of protecting all the digital data from unauthorized access, usage, disclosure, alteration, or destroying.

Governance, on the other hand, includes all-encompassing procedures, policies, and the standards that focus on handling and using the data responsibly.

When an organization has inadequate data security and governance, the results can be:

For instance, if various users, gadgets, devices, and networks are completely breached within the company. Confirm and validate all access requests within the company, irrespective of where they commenced.

Another good practice for data security is to use strong encryption algorithms to safeguard valuable data both at rest and in transit. You must also make it a point that all the encryption keys are adequately managed and rotated on a timely basis.

You must also plan to identify and address any vulnerabilities, assess all risks, and allocate a budget for remediation methods. You can also seek the help of experts and professionals who can guide you through a thorough assessment and provide thoughtful recommendations.

It is a good practice to provide training to users and employees to implement an additional verification factor beyond passwords. Multi-factor authentication includes biometric data and other factors such as tokens or one-time passwords.

Another best practice for data security is to schedule patching activities in the organization. Additionally, it is also crucial to upgrade all the applications, firmware, and operating systems within the enterprise. It eventually helps to avert breaches of different vulnerabilities.

An enterprise must plan to maintain a well-drafted document that outlines the roles and responsibilities of each employee, ensuring who will handle and manage the data and take accountability for it. It will also help in understanding the personnel who will make informed decisions based on the data.

Plan to classify data according to the sensitive information, critical information and regulatory needs. Accordingly, you can plan to apply respective security controls on each data category. Moreover, you must also restrict data usage to authorized persons.

One of the best practices for data governance is to follow the RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) methodology. It enables granting access to the organization’s staff according to their defined roles. You must grant access to users who need to view that particular information in the data.

Another technique is ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control), where data access is given based on the user’s attributes.

It is vital to monitor data access, alterations, and deletions. These are the essential activities related to any data in the enterprise. Auditing data based on these activities is the right practice to follow.

By efficiently reviewing all the generated audit logs, you can quickly identify any suspicious activity, which in turn ensures compliance within the organization.

You must provide training to employees to understand data governance policies and all related procedures. It is also essential to foster a workforce that knows how to handle data and effectively report incidents as and when they arise.

While leveraging cloud services, make sure that service providers abide by all the necessary standards of security as well as compliance framework. You must also execute additional control wherever required, for instance, end-to-end encryption method and tracking access.

Evaluating all the security and governance practices of all clients, third-party vendors, partners, and suppliers is essential. You must plan to document a contract and agreement for managing this, ensuring that the document includes the responsibilities and expectations of all parties involved.

It is a best practice to draft an incident response plan and test it regularly. It will help you ensure the efficient handling of data breach activity, security incidents in the system and other relevant disruptions that occur.

So, now you must have got the jist of data security and governance in detail. It is essential to note that efficient data security and governance are possible with the help of a well-thought-out methodology that involves users, processes, and technology.

With the help of the aforementioned best practices of data security and data governance, enterprises can considerably decrease the risk of data mishandling, data breaches, non-compliance, and damage to their brand image.

Even after implementing a well-drafted data security and governance policy, it is essential to revise and evaluate it regularly.

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