With the tremendous rise in malware-based Ransomware coupled with regulations such as HIPAA, GLBA and others, data security has never been a more visible concern for all organizations.  There are five primary aspects of Data Security that InfoSec Advisors can help clients address:

1. Data Access Controls – access to data within an organization should be appropriately compartmentalized with access allowed on a “need to know basis” ONLY.  Applications and data should only be enabled for employees for whom there is justified business reason.  This is a very common risk exposure within organizations across all industries that requires appropriate monitoring and mitigating controls.
2. Data Loss Prevention – recognizing when inappropriate file transfers or data moves are being attempted real time is critical to preventing unauthorized data access and loss to third parties.  Often times, these compromises of data are most likely insider jobs and are difficult to detect in the days of using encrypted Cloud services and third party email via browsers particularly those not authorized by the IT organization.
3. Data at Rest – (stored) on servers, laptops, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, thumb drives and in the Cloud MUST be encrypted to certain best practice standards.
4. Data in Transit – embedded or attached to email, moved via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server to server, faxed, or downloaded via the Internet or over remote access connection methods MUST also be encrypted to certain best practice standards.
5. Data must be replicated to insure business continuity and the replicated data must be timely and in small enough time intervals to adequately reduce risk. This replicated data must also be encrypted.  Plus, the incremental snapshots of the replicated data must be retained for a minimum of 7 days, ideally 30 days or longer to safeguard against replicating ransomware or other malware to your replicated data systems at your secondary or disaster recovery data center.  Insufficient windows of incremental data being replicated could make restoration of data unlikely or impossible.

Addressing the preceding best practices is challenging because one product technology cannot do it all and performance impacts must be prevented.  You need a partner who has the experience of understanding how to address all of these issues successfully. InfoSec Advisors is such a partner.  Call us to see how we can help!