Enhancing Data Security: Overlooked Practices and Essential Strategies

Security, particularly cyber security, plays a pivotal role in preventing unauthorised exploitation of systems, networks, and technologies. A prevalent adage underscores the inevitability of security breaches: "It's not if, but when." Despite the availability of sophisticated solutions to combat such threats, many organisations overlook fundamental information management practices.

Implementing these practices significantly bolsters defences against unauthorised access, theft, or data ransom. Key practices include:

• Implementing a least privilege data access model
• Performing data classification and labelling
• Maintaining a robust backup and recovery solution

Information represents the most valuable asset for any organisation, and is dispersed across various platforms. As organisations grapple with exponential data growth, it puts immense pressure on the systems safeguarding and managing it, as well as the personnel overseeing its administration. Managing unstructured and "dark data" presents additional challenges, ascertaining its value or sensitivity, identifying authorised users, and determining relevant data become increasingly arduous tasks.

Visibility is key to risk reduction

A least privileged data access model restricts user access to essential data and applications for their tasks, minimising unnecessary exposure. It provides users with access only to the data and applications required for performing their work. However, assessments often reveal alarming data and application exposure due to global access group memberships. This access not only poses significant risks but also proves challenging to audit and remediate across data repositories and application suites.

Moreover, insider threats, whether through employee misuse or hijacked accounts, compound security risks. Global access issues are often intertwined with broken Access Control Lists (ACLs), hindering correct permissions inheritance and complicating remediation efforts. Addressing these challenges requires not only comprehensive reporting, which provides a clear view of the security landscape but also automated remediation solutions, which can swiftly and effectively address security issues without disrupting business operations. These strategies are crucial in maintaining data security, providing you with the confidence that your data and applications are protected.

3 key areas to focus your efforts on

Organisations can benefit from conducting Essential8 Assessments to improve their cyber resiliency and reduce the risk of successful cyber attacks, data breaches and unauthorised access and bolster their data protection defences. The Essential 8 framework relates to backups, and provides a guided strategy on how to perform regular backups that are regularly testing, are redundant and are kept offsite.

Remediating global access on all data platforms is a big first step towards securing data and complying with a least privilege data access model. It is also an essential step in limiting the blast radius caused by exploitation.

However, many organisations continue to struggle to assess the value and risk associated with their data due to factors such as its nature, volume, and storage location. This underscores the importance of linking risk management efforts with data sensitivity to enhance overall data security and compliance measures.

1. ‍Data classification
   ‍Data classification emerges as a vital step to gain visibility into organisational data, identify sensitive information, and prioritise security measures. However, simply classifying data may not suffice. Platforms that integrate classification with sensitivity labels empower users and systems to recognise and protect sensitive data effectively. Incorporating Data Loss Prevention (DLP) measures and protection mechanisms further enhances security, ensuring targeted and sophisticated defences against potential threats.‍
2. Prioritise on “Backup and Recovery”
   ‍Backup and recovery represent the final bastion against data loss and disruption, offering essential safeguards in the face of evolving threats. While not conventionally viewed as security measures, robust backup solutions and practices play a crucial role in data protection and restoration. However, these solutions often face neglect or insufficient attention, leading to gaps in recovery options and reduced effectiveness. Declining budgets, misconceptions about backup versus archiving, and inadequate testing further exacerbate these challenges, leaving organisations vulnerable to data loss and ransomware attacks.
3. ‍Be prepared for the worst
   To fortify defences, organisations must prioritise backup and recovery initiatives, ensuring regular audits, testing, and updates. Adhering to best practices, such as maintaining up-to-date architectures and leveraging ransomware protection features, is critical. The 3-2-1 rule—maintaining three copies of data on two different media types, with one copy stored offsite—is a cornerstone for resilient backup strategies. Proactive measures and comprehensive backup solutions provide a vital safety net, ensuring organisations can recover effectively during a security breach or data loss.

Shifting a leader’s mindset on backup and recovery

As technology experts operating in today's modern world, we see backup and recovery becoming more important than ever. However, business leaders often overlook and undervalue backup and recovery. Numerous factors contribute to this disregard. Backups are perceived as mundane, with complex and outdated interfaces, often relegated to junior IT staff lacking adequate experience or training.

Backups play a vital role in your robust cyber defence strategy:

• ‍Rapid Recovery: When ransomware encrypts critical data, backups assume the role of clandestine blueprints, facilitating swift system restoration and minimising operational disruptions.‍
• Outsmarting Adversaries: Organisations can out manoeuvre ransomware perpetrators by leveraging backups, rendering their extortion efforts futile and preserving operational continuity.‍
• Ensuring Business Continuity: Consider backups as the proverbial spare tyre for organisational resilience. They provide seamless recovery from security breaches or technical mishaps, ensuring uninterrupted business operations.‍
• Regulatory Compliance: Like the indispensable fire escapes in commercial structures, regulatory frameworks mandate secure backups. A comprehensive backup strategy ensures regulatory adherence and mitigates legal ramifications.‍
• Empowering Defensive Postures: Armed with robust backup solutions, organisations are emboldened to confront cyber threats head-on, channelling efforts towards threat mitigation rather than succumbing to data loss apprehensions.
• ‍Disaster and Cyber Preparedness: Backups form the cornerstone of an organisation's disaster recovery blueprint. Rigorous testing and training exercises ensure readiness to navigate crises with precision and agility.

The backup function is no longer just for storing data. It's a strategic asset that helps organisations stay strong in the face of cyber threats. When managed correctly, it can be a powerful tool that helps your organisation bounce back from cyber attacks and emerge stronger than ever.

Managed Backup is your last line of defence

Since the inception of digital data, backup and recovery have been a cornerstone in the Information Management Lifecycle, offering paramount protection against data loss. Traditionally regarded as an insurance policy against hardware failures, environmental disasters, or human errors, backups serve as the fundamental mechanism for data restoration, ensuring minimal downtime (Recovery Time Objective) and minimal data loss (Recovery Point Objective) in the event of breaches.

The quality and redundancy of hardware have greatly increased, reducing the requirement to perform regular or comprehensive system restores. Software snapshot features provide end users with instant self-help restores. These are but a few examples that have led many organisations to ignore regular recovery testing.

To complicate and dilute backup and recovery even more, many organisations also mistakenly consider data backup the same as data archiving. This generally keeps adding data to the backup platform—more and more data is backed up, and retention periods are extended to unnecessarily large timeframes to meet the misplaced "archiving period. ”The eventual result is that the backup solution gets overwhelmed, which inevitably results in low backup success rates and gaps in recovery options.

Declining budgets and priorities also make it difficult to keep backup and recovery solutions up to date with the latest best practice architecture and product features, such as hardened backup repositories and deduplication technologies. As a result, organisations often harbour a false sense of security regarding the efficacy of their backups and the completeness of their recovery capabilities.

It is essential for any organisation to:

• Perform a regular audit of their backup and recovery solution.
• Perform regular restore testing.
• Keep the architecture and software up to date.
• Implement the latest features to protect against ransomware, including air gapped and immutable backup repositories.
• Follow the 3-2-1 rule - three copies, held on two different media types, with one copy located offsite.

Conclusion: Safeguarding your most valuable asset

In summary, enhancing data security requires a multifaceted approach encompassing access management, data classification, and robust backup strategies. Partnering with experienced professionals like Spirit can provide organisations with the expertise needed to navigate these challenges effectively. By proactively addressing security vulnerabilities and fortifying backup measures, organisations can safeguard their most valuable asset—data—against inevitable threats.

Remember, it's not a matter of if, but when, and preparedness is key to resilience in the face of adversity.