Data is at the heart of every business, but is your company’s data secure? The implications of data loss can be significant: from lost business to damage to your reputation.

You must understand what is really at risk and then protect it.  Below are five key principles that you must remember when it comes to protecting your data:

1.       Privacy

You can enforce data privacy by using encryption or by combining data fragmentation with encryption.

2.       Integrity

Data integrity is a term used to refer to the accuracy and reliability of data. To be considered reliable and accurate, data must be complete – with no variations or compromises from the original. You can protect data integrity by using storage consolidation.

Storage consolidation is achieved by centralizing data storage and placing it on multiple servers. The prime objective of doing so is to provide secure backups and retrieval for enterprise data, but also to prevent any delays in accessing the data.

3.        Accessibility

There are different ways to protect data accessibility and prevent data loss; one method being replication. Replication provides instant data recovery in the event of a disaster. It saves IT administrators’ time, preserves network bandwidth and dramatically reduces the frequency of backup activities.

4.        Responsibility

Employees, whether intentionally or not, may release confidential information to persons outside the organization. Therefore, protecting the company’s data is everyone’s responsibility. It is important to educate employees about what is considered confidential information, whether that information can or cannot be transmitted by email and how, such as by instituting policies to review the content of outgoing email and attachments and/or using encryption to transmit the data.

Some examples of sensitive data are:

• Social Security Numbers
• Credit card numbers
• Driver’s license numbers
• Personally identifiable information (such as     patient, student, employee and donor information)
• Proprietary research data
• Confidential legal data
• Confidential financial data
• Other proprietary data that should not be shared with     the public

5.        Assessment Capacity

IT staff in can experience the benefits of virtualization through:

• Cost reduction
• Simplification and automation of administration and     management
• Efficient use of resources
• Load balancing and fault tolerance
• Agility for testing, development and application rollouts
• Isolation for security