Shibu Paul has 25 years of experience in the field of Digital transformation – IT, IS and telecom – having worked with Sify Ltd, British Telecom Global services (India) and BT Americas in various roles. He was part of the team that launched the first IP network, first private ISP and first Certifying Authority in India. He joined Array in 2009 as country sales head and progressed to leadership positions including Country Manager and Regional Director-APAC. In his current role, he is instrumental in driving the business for Array in the region, and setting up end-to-end operations including a strong channel, robust technical team, and solid support infrastructure for Array customers worldwide.
The amount of data produced, consumed, and communicated over the internet every single day is staggering. Findings by IDC show that:
“64.2ZB data was created or replicated in 2020.”
An estimated 306.4 billion emails were sent and received in 2020, and this number is expected to jump to 376.4 billion by 2025.
Moreover, according to IDC, the data created over the next 3 years will be more than data created over the past 30 years.
This precious data containing confidential information and private communication travels over the internet, and attackers are trying to get their hands on it at all times.
As Clive Robert Humby, a Chief Data Scientist coined the term in 2006:
Data is the new oil.
It’s evident that data, if slipped into the wrong hands, could break the company’s reputation and bank. This risk is heightened after the pandemic. While companies adopted remote work quickly, they scrambled to keep up with their security requirements.
Therefore, in this article, we’ll discuss how encrypting your data is essential and how it can help your organization protect its data.
Encryption and tokenization are the first and most important data security strategies. Your data will be converted into a unique code using a trusted data encryption solution. As a result, the data is extremely secure. The encrypted data can only be accessed and read by those who have the decryption key or password. Asymmetric or symmetric encryption methods may be used, depending on your preferences and needs.
Data confidentiality has become increasingly important as organizations increasingly transmit data via the Internet, PCs, and various networks. It is time for businesses to abandon the old data encryption standard in favor of more modern approaches that use algorithms to protect their data.
A good data encryption solution protects systems, digital devices, email, applications, and data. Remember, with your employees’ widespread use of external drives, removable media, and cloud storage, data protection is a major challenge. To address this issue, the data must be encrypted automatically. This means that unauthorized individuals cannot decrypt even copied data.
Tokenization is one of the most modern, popular, effective, and dependable encryption methods for data security. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with exclusive symbols without damaging or changing the data itself, making this method dependable and unfailing. This reduces the amount of data that your organization must keep on hand. This data security encryption solution is becoming increasingly popular among organizations that handle credit card information and operate e-commerce sites.
Discovery and Classification
As more organizations allow their employees to work remotely, business operations are increasingly being performed in the cloud. Telecommuting necessitates data sharing and storage. While the trend of remote working has numerous advantages, it poses data security challenges to organizations.
Organizations today must understand where their data is and how it is being handled. As a result of the interdependence of business functions, data is stored in a variety of locations, including PCs, digital devices, applications, the cloud, databases, shared systems, and so on. As a result, data security has become a problem for businesses.
Here are some tips for data discovery and classification:
Discover the data in your network file shares, cloud, systems, and SharePoint to assess their sensitivity and importance to your business
Here are some tips for data discovery and classification:
- Examine the data on your network file sharing, cloud, systems, and SharePoint to determine its sensitivity and value to your company.
- Determine the value and criticality of the data so you know what you have, where it is stored, and how to protect it.
- Sort the information into categories depending on its content and context.
- Secure the data in the locations where it is kept.
- Isolate and highlight any data that isn’t protected for risk analysis.
SSL VPN – a Layer of Security for Vulnerable Data
Remote style of working emerged and was embraced by businesses as an aftermath of the pandemic. This means employees are working and accessing the company’s data from various locations and devices. Besides, every business establishes communication channels between their supplies, vendors, and branch offices over the internet. Imagine the quantity of precious information being transmitted over the internet every second.
That’s why the cybercrime rates have gone over the roof post-pandemic. Hackers are trying to catch this data while it’s traveling from the client to the server or vice versa by conducting attacks like man-in-the-middle, DDoS, and eavesdropping.
Therefore, we can safely thank technology like SSL VPN that safeguards a company’s private conversation and confidential information from these threats. Only the people who are authorized have access to operate and consume the information.
SSL VPN enables contractors, clients, and employees to safely access private information from anywhere in the world and stay connected. It safeguards communications and maintains data integrity.
But before we cherish the invention of SSL, we must know that SSL, like every other technology, has to be deployed with utmost caution.
Hackers can disguise themselves as a genuine source of information and slip into the stream of encrypted data, eventually causing the damage they intended to. Malicious data that is encrypted can bypass firewalls and reach its destination. The most common type of encrypted malicious data attack is malware. Therefore, in addition to the above-mentioned technology, SSL Interceptor should be deployed to gain visibility into the encrypted traffic.
They act like a middlebox, sitting between the client and the server; its role is to analyze the data coming and going to the client and the server and eradicate or filter the malicious content, preventing attacks. The said box is authorized to decrypt the data, analyze it and re-encrypt and allow it to travel to its destination. The interceptors usually are deployed in conjunction with solutions such as next-generation firewalls, network monitoring, and intrusion detection and prevention, SSL intercept offloads compute-intensive decryption and re-encryption tasks to allow essential security functions to operate at scale.
Pandemic has accelerated 2 year’s digital transformation to 2 months, which means the remote and hybrid working style is here to stay. Encrypting data is a smart strategy that should be configured carefully. Array’s SSL Intercept safeguards your enterprise from attacks, but it also filters out malicious data, providing a solid security system to your enterprise.