Data breach instances make the headlines regularly and for good reason: they’ve become endemic. From large energy supply companies being held ransom to hotel chains having customer data stolen to healthcare breaches of patient data, data governance and data security are top-of-mind for every organisation.

Just recently, hackers walked into the front door of a Marriott hotel and stole 20GB of data, including credit card details. They coerced an employee into handing over the “keys” to a terminal in the lobby.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened to Marriott either. In 2014, it had over 340 million customer records stolen. This breach wasn’t even discovered until 2018. Data breaches are commonplace and are rarely a temporary inconvenience. Government organisations, businesses and even individuals are subjected to data breaches all the time.

With data security, the smallest vulnerability can open up your defences and allow hackers to slip through, even for a brief period, stealing your most valuable asset: your data.

As the world’s leading experts in “vertical intelligence”, NowVertical Group leverages our team’s security and data governance expertise and solutions to help public and private sector enterprises stay vigilant. By bringing together platforms like the former DocAuthority and Exonar Reveal under a single roof, we’ve built a comprehensive solution for top-down data governance, visibility and protection for organisations in the most vulnerable industries and regions of the world.

Our team built this guide to help organisations assess their risk and reconsider their posture in light of these increased threats on a global scale.

Defining a data breach

A data breach is ostensibly any unauthorised person gaining access to confidential, protected or sensitive information. The files can be viewed, stolen or possibly even shared with others. Everyone from corporations to government entities are targeted because they have the most valuable data.

The Marriott case is the perfect example of one slight lapse in security allowing access to valuable information. One employee letting their guard down can allow bad actors to infiltrate an entire organisation.

Most breaches result from poor:

User behaviour
Technology

As businesses and the human experience become more connected across multiple instances, the opportunity for breaching those instances compounds exponentially.

Technology has moved fast to bridge these gaps, but human error is still an enormous factor. It takes only one person to expose an entire organisation. To understand the risk, we must first understand how breaches take place.

The obvious assumption is that hackers are trying to gain access to the system through the weakest point of entry, therefore gaining access to more important parts of the system. It’s true that a large amount of data-breach incidents result from bad actors attempting to extort the victim, but they can just as easily occur through oversight and flawed infrastructure.

The damage

In most cases, data breaches are devastating. Far beyond fixing access issues or employee/stakeholder awareness training, an entire rethink of the system is in order.

For a business organisation, the stain of a data breach is hard to wash off. Customers will always associate that organisation with lacklustre security.

A government organisation has it even worse. The erosion of public trust in government institutions can be a matter of national security. When a governmental department is found to have breached the confidence of the public, it can quickly find itself without public support. This makes their job that much harder.

Preventing a data breach

NowVertical Group has partnered with some of the largest organisations across the world to help build comprehensive security programmes, protocols and platforms, and help mitigate these risks at scale.

Limit access to your most valuable data. This can be difficult in an organisation that requires many people to have access to sensitive data, but it’s a must. This is where having a comprehensive data governance policy in place helps.
Ensure third-party vendors comply with data governance procedures. Stakeholders must guarantee that third-party vendors aren’t allowing access to your system to unauthorised personnel.
Train employees in security awareness — and repeat the training regularly.
Create and maintain a rigid data governance policy — and implement it with the support of Now privacy.

Bifurcating your organisational stance on data governance is not only time consuming, it opens up the organisation to attack. By elucidating the end goal of complete control over your data to all stakeholders, you ensure would-be attackers have a hard time gaining access.

Criminals are lazy. If you show a united front and make it hard for them, they’ll most likely move on to another target. You can take control of your data leakage issues. You can become the data security bellwether your organisation needs.

About NowVertical Group
NowVertical Group is a big data, analytics and vertical intelligence (VI) software and solutions company. NOW’s mission is to help organisations make bold decisions with the confidence of data. VI solutions are organised by industry vertical and are built upon a foundational set of data technologies that fuse, secure and mobilise data for both public and private sector organisations. With major customers ranging from Fortune 100 companies to key departments of the US federal government, Now’s solutions help customers advance their data capabilities at scale while mitigating risk and exposure. Contact [email protected] for more information.