Data Security As a Discipline–What Organisations Must Do

Privacy has always been important for business, but in the last decade, it has gained far greater importance, especially after the increased accessibility of personal data via social media apps. To avoid legal and ethical implications, organisations must adhere to standard data privacy regulations (legal or otherwise).

Moreover, organisations that handle personal data must understand the basic requisites of privacy before being able to uphold ethical values and draft policies.

Here are some best practices that can help your organisation regulate and secure its data flow.

Know Your Data
You cannot protect what you don’t know. Each organisation must have a record of every piece of data it collects, stores, and processes (both digitally as well as hard copies). Additionally, organizations should keep a record of the source of the data collected, its usage, and its storage time before it is disposed of.

Develop a Data Privacy Strategy
Every organisation must develop, enforce, and implement an organization-wide data privacy policy. Security policies for each category of data should be clearly defined and consist of clear-cut procedures to organize the data flow. These include customer consent, retention of records, secure data disposal, and international data transfer.

A data privacy strategy should have a comprehensive plan on:

• Control and prevention of data breaches.

• Documentation of data breaches for remedial and evidentiary purposes.

• Responses to data requests and data demands made by government authorities.

Legal Adherence
Legal requirements vary depending on the category of data your organization is processing and the jurisdictions within which your business operates. For instance, the GDPR is mandatory for all organizations that offer goods and services to EU citizens (including for organizations that are located outside of the EU).

Amidst rising data privacy concerns, several countries are drafting their own data privacy laws. So an effective way to ensure your organization complies with all legal privacy laws is to get help from your legal team to identify all the jurisdictions within which your organization operates and draft privacy policies in accordance with them.

Conduct Data Privacy Awareness Training
It is not possible to effectively secure an organization without educating the employees who work for it. Therefore, it is imperative for every employee to have a basic understanding of data privacy, its significance, and the consequences of a data leak.

Monitoring and Compliance
Securing data is not a project but an ongoing process. Incorporate powerful IT management solutions to monitor and comply with global privacy laws. Know what sensitive data is stored where, assess the risk associated with it, and implement policy-based data protection measures with DataSecurity Plus, ManageEngine’s data protection software.

ManageEngine is the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation. Established and emerging enterprises—including 9 of every 10 Fortune 100 organizations—rely on ManageEngine’s real-time IT management tools to ensure optimal performance of their IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, endpoints, and more.

ManageEngine has offices worldwide, including the United States, the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, India, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, China, and Australia, as well as 200+ global partners to help organizations tightly align their business and IT. For more information, please visit manageengine.com, follow the company blog, and get connected on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.