How do we prevent data breaches?

Data breaches have become a regular occurrence, and they carry a heavy cost for an organization. In 2022, the average cost of a data breach in the United States was $9.44M.

While any business can be the victim of a data breach, there are steps that a business can take to manage its data breach risks. Here, we outline five steps that your business can take to prevent data breaches.

How to prevent data breaches

Data breaches can cause significant harm to an organization, its customers, and its brand image. A successful data breach can result in the loss of corporate intellectual property, customer data, or other sensitive information. However, an organization can manage this risk by implementing these five best practices.

1. Establish clear policies and procedures
   • Although most data breaches involve employees in most cases, these trusted insiders aren’t trying to harm the business. Negligence, misunderstandings, and lack of knowledge of corporate security policies put an organization’s data security at risk.
   • Preventing accidental data breaches requires clear communication of corporate security policies. All employees, contractors, and other trusted insiders should sign corporate security policies and confidentiality agreements. By doing so, a business reduces the risk of accidents because everyone with access to sensitive data understands how that data can be used and how it should be protected.
2. Secure hiring and termination procedures
   • Onboarding and offboarding present some of the greatest risks to an organization’s data security. Employees entering the organization are granted access to corporate resources, which determines the risk that they pose to the company. 40% of departing US employees admit to taking corporate data with them, abusing their legitimate access, and breaching sensitive company data.
   • Secure onboarding and hiring processes are essential to managing an organization’s risk of data breaches. New hires’ access should be tailored to their role, and departing employees’ access to corporate resources should be managed and monitored to ensure that corporate data doesn’t walk out the door with them.
3. Monitor access and activity
   • Visibility is one of the biggest challenges businesses face when attempting to manage their risk of data breaches. 43% of companies don’t know where their data is, making it impossible to protect it effectively.
   • As corporate IT infrastructure and data stores grow and expand, attempting to monitor and manage them manually is unscalable and unsustainable. Companies need tools that automatically discover, map and track what is deployed across their entire network infrastructure, servers, databases, and more.
   • This provides crucial visibility into how corporate systems are used and how data moves through them, which is essential to identifying and halting potential data breaches.
4. Implementing data security in the endpoint
   • As remote work grows more common, on-prem perimeter-focused data loss prevention (DLP) solutions are no longer enough. Employees working remotely will be directly connected to the Internet, and remote users’ devices may store sensitive corporate data.
   • Managing data breach risks for distributed and remote enterprises requires DLP solutions that monitor and secure remote users’ mobile devices and desktop computers. This allows the IT staff to determine what sensitive data is leaving, when, and through which specific channel or device based on the organization's defined compliance rules for data protection.
5. Use data breach prevention tools
   • Sensitive corporate data can be breached in various different ways. Employees may upload it to unapproved cloud-based applications. Malware may collect and exfiltrate from infected computers. Phishing attacks may trick employees into handing it over to an attacker.
   • Data breach prevention tools are essential to maintaining visibility and control over an organization’s sensitive data. These solutions can ensure that data is stored securely, monitor how it is accessed and used, and block detected exfiltration attempts.