What Is Data Security? 

January 25, 2022
What Is Data Security? 

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.

Keeping your data secure is very important. No matter whether it is personal data or sensitive data, ensuring it is safe from unauthorised access or viewing can help to keep your identity and information private. 

This is also known as data security. But what is the definition of data security and how does it come into play within our daily lives? This article will cover these points and more so you can become well informed around the subject of data security. 

What Is The Definition Of Data Security? 

Data security refers to the process of protecting data from unauthorised access and data corruption throughout its lifecycle.

This includes protecting the data that you have from attacks that can encrypt or destroy data, such as ransomware, as well as attacks that can modify or corrupt your data. Some organisations can hold quite a lot of data about a person, including sensitive personal data, which is exactly the reason why some industries require a much higher level of data security than others.

The Importance Of Data Security

Data security includes every aspect of information security from the physical security of hardware and storage devices to administrative and access controls, as well as the logical security of software applications. It also includes organizational policies and procedures. Because of this, it plays such an important role within both public and private sectors and organisations for many different reasons. 

  • Legal and moral obligation: Customers have put their full trust in companies to protect their data from falling into the wrong hands. For example, many financial businesses may be subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) that forces companies to take all reasonable measures to protect all their user data.
  • Risk of a data breach or hack: Taking the issue of data security very seriously is extremely important, no matter what industry you work in. Failing to do so can result in your reputation being permanently damaged in the event of a publicised and high-profile breach or hack.
  • Financial and logistical consequences: If a data breach occurs, cleaning up the mess of consequences left behind can take a lot of time, and cost a lot of money. You, or members of your team, will need to spend many hours and pay hefty sums of cash to be able to assess and repair the damage, as well as determine how and why the breach occurred, and what needs to be improved within the business. 
The image shows the words 'data privacy' in block capitals surrounded by data scientists asking the question 'what is data security'.

What Is Data Security Law?

In the UK, the Data Protection Act has been put into place to implement this.

The Data Protection Act 2018 is the UK’s implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Its aim is to control how your personal information is used by organisations, businesses or the government.

This means that anyone who is responsible for storing or using data must ensure that the information is used fairly, lawfully and transparently, and is handled in a way that ensures appropriate security to protect against unlawful processing.

Data Protection Vs Data Security

It can be very easy to get confused by these terms ‘data protection’ and ‘data security as they sound so similar. But the truth is, the difference in the definition of these two phrases is very important when it comes to keeping your data secure. 

Data protection refers to the mechanism of making copies of your data to restore in the event of a loss or corruption. This could be using a hard drive or making a copy of your most important fuels onto an online cloud that can be backed up and restored at any time. 

Data security, on the other hand, refers to the mechanism of keeping your data safe from unauthorised access and distribution. This can be done in a wide variety of ways which are discussed further below. 

Best Practices for Ensuring Data Security

Data security technology comes in a wide variety of different mechanisms, each of which is suited to a different application. Even so, all the different types have been designed with one main aim: to protect your data from a growing number of threats.

There are several steps, tactics, and best practices that can help you to minimise the chances of experiencing a data breach, loss, or exposure.

Identify and classify sensitive data

To be able to securely store and process data, you need to identify what type of data you have. You can then organise the data into categories using a data classification process. This way you can control user access to critical data and store it in secure locations, therefore reducing the risk of data exposure, breaches or data loss.

Control access to sensitive data

To be able to implement the best practices for you the data you have, you need to apply the appropriate access controls. Access controls should restrict access to information based on the level of authority of the person, whether they have the right to access the data, and more importantly, what type of data it is. 

Sensitive data requires a greater level of protection because it is extremely private and is therefore considered very delicate. Access controls can be physical, technical or administrative depending on your business and the type of industry that you work in. 

Use data encryption

Data encryption essentially applies a code to every individual piece of data and will let anyone access the encrypted data without the authorised key given. All critical business data should be encrypted, whether it is held on portable devices or over the network.

Portable systems should use encryption if they hold important data of any kind. As they can easily get lost or stolen whilst on the move causing a leak of personal data, encryption ensures that even if this does happen, the data is still secure. 

Delete unused data

Storing stale data for longer than necessary puts you in the middle of an unnecessary, yet quite significant liability, in terms of data security. To prevent this, you as an organisation should have adequate processes and technologies in place to delete any sensitive data that’s no longer necessary for ongoing business activities.

Thomas Lambert
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