How do you do data breach management to help you back up from this incident? What should you do to make your management efficient and effective? To find out more, keep on reading.
Data Breach Management
To begin, let us define what data breach management is. It is a set of procedures and policies to manage data breaches. It should be included in your business continuity management process.
The basic steps in managing data breaches are the following:
- Identify the situation to be able to formulate contingency plans.
- Implement contingency plans.
- Conduct a thorough investigation, if necessary.
- Disclose the incident to all affected parties.
- Review the incident and take corrective measures.
- Develop an assessment to prevent future data breaches.
The first step is to identify if any data breach has occurred. To do this, you need to know:
- what personal information that your company collects and stores,
- how it is processed,
- where it is stored,
- how it is transmitted,
- what access controls are in place (who has access to what information),
- and how it is secured (how can unauthorized parties gain access).
The more detailed you get with this, the better prepared you will be when the breach occurs.
Once you know what personal information your company collects and stores, you should determine which of that information poses a risk in case of a data breach. Your company should implement policies on handling that information by the law.
Then, your company should have safeguards in place for preventing unauthorized access or transmission of personal information.
Data Breach Management: Security Measures
What are some of the common security measures for safeguarding personal information? You can use encryption when storing sensitive data or transmitting it over the network. You can also segment your network so that if one part gets infected with malware, other parts will not be affected too much by it.
Then, you can implement an access control policy that will prevent unauthorized persons from accessing sensitive information or systems containing sensitive information. You can also use firewalls to protect your network from external threats coming from hackers across the Internet or other networks/systems connected to yours.
You will also want to have incident response procedures in place to react quickly when incidents occur or are discovered. For example, a hacker has broken into your computer system and stolen sensitive data files.
Then, having incident response procedures in place will enable you to promptly remove all malicious software from all computers on your network. Even before the hacker has a chance to copy any data files containing sensitive data out of your system and onto his computer system stored on his computer hard disk drive (HDD).
Last Words
As you can see, data breach management is a very important aspect of business continuity management. In today’s digital world, your company will be exposed to data breaches. It is important to have incident response procedures in place to address incidents when they occur.
In the past, there were few cases of data breaches, but nowadays they are becoming more and more common. So, always keep on the lookout.
