Data security is a process that protects corporate data and prevents data loss from unauthorized access. It also includes the process of protecting your data from various attacks online like ransomware as well as other critical attacks that can destroy, corrupt, or modify your data without your permission. The data security process also ensures that the data is available to the members only who have been permitted to access it.
Some standards require you to keep a high level of data security and protection to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As the GDPR plays a major role in human rights law and privacy law in the European Union (EU), it mandates every organization to handle sensitive data and other information securely. Your data protection and security policy should comply with the respective regulations and standards, whatever your organization category falls under.
For example, pharmaceutical in the USA must protect and secure the data like Private Health Information (PHI) to comply with the HIPAA standard. The full form for HIPAA is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Let’s take another example. E-commerce industries that handle payment information must comply with digital customer data privacy laws. It ensures that the organization keeps and handles the private information and sensitive data of customers securely.
Even if you think that your organization is not subject to any compliance standards and regulation acts, your business still depends on a data security process to keep your business surviving. Because it can impact your company’s key assets as well as private and sensitive data that belongs to your customers.
What are the types of digital data states?
The way that categorizes structured and unstructured data constitutes the three states of digital data. They are:
- Data at Rest
- Data in Motion
- Data in Use
Let’s see a little brief about all the above three types of data states one by one.
Data at Rest
Data that are not currently accessed by anyone and are not being transferred anywhere. These data are said to have already reached their final destination in the appropriate hardware. Data at rest are not being processed by the CPU. This state of data is said to be more stable than the data in the other two states such as motion and use. The following examples help you understand what exactly the data at rest are:
- Storing our personal files in external drives like USB flash drives, memory cards, portable hard disks, etc.
- Storing vital data in a Storage Area Network (SAN).
- Backup files that are stored on offsite remote servers.
- Organizations store their processed data and important files on cloud storage like dropbox, one drive, google drive, etc.
Government organizations, corporates, enterprise-level businesses, and other institutions take more precautions to secure and prevent threats caused by hackers and fraudsters to data at rest, including hierarchical password protection, data encryption, outside data security services, and secure server rooms. Furthermore, strict data security protocols and multifactor authentication for employees help to secure and protect data that is at rest. Some types of critical data like specific security measures, public records, and medical records are mandated by regional law.
Data in Motion
Data in motion is a state where data are being transferred or moving between locations across various computer systems or within the same computer. The data that is within a computer’s Random Access Memory (RAM). Mostly, the motion state of data is initiated from its previous state “data in use”. The following examples will demonstrate how data in motion state occurs.
- The process stage between the events at the moment you click the send button in SMS, email, or WhatsApp and the moment the recipient receives the data in his inbox or WhatsApp.
- While watching videos on a streaming platform like YouTube, the server transfers the data to your client application.
- The stage between the moment finished your speech over the phone and at the other end, the receiver starts hearing your voice.
- The duration of time when you are waiting for a webpage to be loaded completely since when you entered the web address on the browser. In this stage, the browser first sends the data to the server called “request” and the server responds to the browser with the web page data called “response”.
Most likely, data in motion requires much more precaution to secure and protect it from hackers. Generally, organizations try to encrypt data in the rest state itself. Only after that, they will transmit the data between systems over the internet.
Data in Use
Data in use is a state of data that is currently being processed, edited, created, read, and accessed by someone using a computer system or specific software application. The following examples would be enough to explain well what are data in use.
- You are reading this article. Hence, this data is in use now.
- We process data using some specific kinds of tools and applications like MS Office, Notepad++, FTP clients, Outlook, etc.
- Visiting web pages and downloading files on web browsers.
Whatever the stage the data is in, we need to secure and protect everything well and strongly enough through data security solutions and services providers like SISAR BV, etc.
Data Security from SISAR BV
At SISAR BV, we provide end-to-end assistance to our clients in protecting and managing their applications and data. We extend our data security services throughout the entire data lifecycle of certain essential data operations. They are the creation of data, data at rest, data in progress, data in operation, and data destruction. Our end-to-end data security assistance obtains a standard protocol to attain maximum security and protection against several malicious activities and data breaches. The following industry and service coverage area explains more about our best-in-class data security services and solution:
- Cloud Security
- Firewalls
- Network security
- Application security
- Internet of Things (IoT) security
- Data encryption
- Data masking
- Data protection
- Data backup and recovery
- Hardware-based security
- Cyber security
All these data security technologies will better protect and secure customer data as well as data of large businesses from unauthorized and inappropriate access and use. Also, SISAR BV follows its simple core principles and focuses to:
- Provide proficient data security services and solutions to support IT teams.
- Identify and take action on security threats on your behalf.
- Implement cost-effective data security technology to reduce corporate-level risk.
- Encourage data protection and security leadership throughout all sizes of corporates and business organizations.
