What is Data Protection: Everything You Need to Know

February 10, 2022
What is Data Protection: Everything You Need to Know

Our mission is to make data protection easy for people: easy to understand and easy to read about. We do that through our blog posts, making it easy for the end-user to understand personal data protection.

With the exponential increase of the use of the internet, a massive volume of data is being produced and stored at an unprecedented rate daily. Also, technologies, skills, and tools for processing and retrieving various personal and organisational data are evolving rapidly. But unlawful, inaccurate, or unauthorised data processing can lead to identity theft, hampering the basic rights of individuals associated with that data – ensuring data protection is inevitable. 

But what is data protection, and what measures should you take to keep your data secure? To know more about data protection, read on.

Why is Data Protection Important?

Also termed information privacy, data protection is an assemblage of techniques and tools for safeguarding the integrity, availability, and privacy of the personal or organisational data that a business consolidates and processes. Implementing a robust information privacy policy is vital if your business deals with sensitive data – it will help you bypass data damage, fight data theft or misapplication by third parties for scams, and more. 

The importance of data protection is intensifying with the increasing number of computational devices that make computing more complex, producing a massive volume of enterprise data. The result is, it has become crucial for the governing authorities of a country to ensure data security by implementing regulations on data acquisition, processing, management, transmission and disclosure.

What Types of Private Information Is Protected?

Now the question is, what types of data should be protected.

The common kinds of information, be it structured, unstructured, or open, and about the client or staff details, captured leads, transactions, and more, that a business handles and should enforce utmost protection on involve:

  • Identities
  • Mailing address
  • Bank information
  • Contact information like email accounts, phone numbers, social media accounts, etc.
  • Sensitive health records and more.
The image shows the words data protection over various sized cogs.

Data Security Vs. Data Privacy Vs. Data Protection

Some may use these three terms interchangeably, but they have specific meanings:

  • As we have already stated, data protection measures secure your sensitive business data by ensuring disaster recovery and data backup.
  • To be more specific, data security involves the tactics and actions essential to maintain data integrity, fighting malware, data breaches, external/internal cyber threats, and more.
  • Now, what is data privacy, and why is it important? Data privacy means implementing measures and methods adhering to data protection governing guidelines on a set of data, depending on its sensitivity to regulate the process of its collection and assuring only a few authorised and approved users can access it. It is especially crucial for businesses that deal with PII and PHI as these include health records, financial data, names, addresses, and more.

Importance of Data Protection Act

Passed in 1988, DPA (The Data Protection Act) is the UK Act of Parliament that lays down regulations to secure personal data saved by organisations for further processing. 

Companies must abide by the set regulations of the Data Protection Act risk prosecution while performing data processing activities; otherwise, they can be fined or imprisoned by the ICO. 

In May 2018, the DPA was replaced by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), reinforcing DPA laws and defining data privacy and protection legislation inside and outside the EU and EEA.

The GDPR principles that every organization must abide by are:

  • Organisations must handle personal data legally, justly and transparently.
  • Organisations can only use that data for defined and distinct purposes.
  • They can process the essential data only.
  • The information must be correct and kept updated where needed.
  • No organisation can store data longer than required.
  • They must guarantee utmost safety against data damage, unauthorised or illegitimate use, access, processing, or loss. 

Thus, the highly sensitive data that gets secured against unlawful use under GDPR laws are:

  • Race and ethnicity
  • Religious faiths
  • Political viewpoints
  • Criminal records
  • Health records
  • Biometrics and genetics 
  • Sexual preferences, and more

What Are Individual’s GDPR Rights?

The GDPR defined rights every individual holds are:

  • The right of information: While accumulating data, data controllers must offer individuals their identity documents and assure the information will be used rightfully.
  • The right to access data: Individuals should be confirmed if the organisation is processing their information or not and can request a copy of their data.
  • The right to data rectification: Individuals hold the right to get their data rectified by the data controller if needed.
  • The right to data erase: Under set criteria by GDPR, individuals can get their data deleted in no time by the controller.
  • The right to data portability: They can collect and reuse their data for different purposes.
  • Limited rights to stop data processing.
  • They have stronger rights to oppose data processing for public interest or others. 
  • They can oppose being part of the automated decision-making process.

What Are the Methods of Data Security and Data Protection?

What are the types of data protection, and how to protect personal information that your business deals with? Let’s dive deep. 

Some of the most used methods accompanied by data protections tools to secure your business-critical data and help you comply with GDPR include:

Data Loss Prevention

DLP is the method of identifying and blocking malware, exfiltration, data breach, etc., and evading sensitive data damage. DLP helps businesses comply with regulations, secure Personal Identification Information, Intellectual Property, implement protection in BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) environments, achieve greater data visibility, and more. 

Firewalls

Firewalls help you monitor and manage your network traffic by keeping malicious and suspicious traffic away from the network. It enables access control by assessing and validating the authenticity of the incoming traffic and blocking anything unsolicited. 

Backup

Data backup copies and stores your mission-critical data and allows prompt data restoration in case of any disaster or emergency. It is crucial to mirror your high-value data on a separate system for immediate data recovery and to ensure data protection against data loss.

Encryptions

It is a highly recommended data protection method by GDPR that makes your data accessible only with the accurate encryption key by implementing intelligent mathematical functions. Thus, even if your data is stolen and made unreachable to you, it cannot be accessed by fraudsters. 

Thomas Lambert
Latest posts by Thomas Lambert (see all)