Data storage security essentially means two things – protecting data sufficiently from unintended loss or corruption, as well as securing the data from unauthorized access. The most common ways to secure data storage involve encrypting the data (to prevent unauthorized access) and creating multiple layers of backup. While this is a necessary first step, this may alone not be sufficient to protect your data from a sophisticated attack or a multi-level corruption of database. In this article, we will look at the other important strategies that businesses must invest in for a more sophisticated data storage security system.
Physical & Logical Authorization
Restricting data access to authorized users is good, but not enough. For maximum security, it is important to not only restrict access to authorized logged-in users, but also ensure that these users access the system from within authorized physical spaces. This includes authorized IP addresses and devices. This way, it is possible to avoid data attacks even if the details of an authorized user is compromised.
Firewalls Integrated With Virus Detection Systems
Computer devices that are physically authorized to access confidential data systems must be securely integrated with firewalls and virus detection programs that prevent access to other third party websites and services. Some of the worst data theft crimes have been committed through phishing scams that perpetrate through third party emails and social networks like Facebook. It is thus critical to prevent access to these unauthorized services on the same device that is authorized to access your data.
Implement Unified Security Management (USM)
This is a comprehensive security management setup that offers firewalling, intrusion detection, gateway antivirus protection, load balancing and data loss prevention in one place. The advantage with such a system is that it helps protect the server from seemingly minor, yet critical security holes in the system. An example of this is the recent Ghost attack that made use of an innocuous buffer overflow on the gethostbyname function to gain illegitimate access to the server.
Restrict Removable Storage Methods
To secure data within your servers completely, it is important to quarantine them from potential third party vulnerabilities. While USM prevents such foreign scripts from executing on your servers, these tools may not come handy if your server comes in touch with removable storage tools (like removal HDD, flash drives, DVDs, etc.) that are also accessible from other unsecured computer terminals. As a best practice, restrict the deployment of such removable storage tools on the computer accessing your secure data.
Don’t Forget Data Recovery
Ensuring secure data storage is critical, but that should not come in the way of a seamless data recovery system. Businesses routinely require data to be recovered either after a data loss or in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Either way, stringent data storage methodologies can make data recovery extremely tough. While it is tough to maintain a balance between the two, it is a good idea to periodically audit the storage and recovery process in order to ensure that your organization is in a position to not only store data securely, but also recover them when needed.
As we have seen with several hacks over the past several years, no data is secure enough and no matter how well you secure your content, hackers can still find a way. It is thus a cat and mouse game and as a technology analyst, it is important to continue learning on the latest security loopholes in order to build a system that is robust and secure.
