With the world getting more connected with the proliferation of cloud-native applications, devices and the rise of hybrid workspaces, protecting information has become more critical than ever. Any chink in the mammoth IT system can result in unwanted financial damage and irreparable loss of brand reputation.

Therefore, it is imperative for organizations to deploy appropriate information protection systems to preserve business-critical information.

Understanding Information Protection

Put simply, it’s broadly about implementing, managing and monitoring security across all data repositories and objects in the IT system. It includes various tools, security policies, compliance policies and security frameworks. Many business leaders incorrectly perceive implementing information protection measures to be a counter-productive exercise as it may restrict staff in performing their job functions. The truth is once it becomes part of the routine culture, the productivity goes up. The built-in security culture increases ultimately results in enhanced collaboration among team members.

Implementing Information Protection

It involves prioritizing digital assets and risks associated with them, analyzing various controls, and developing suitable protection strategies. Protecting core digital assets in the era of burgeoning security vulnerabilities and increasing cost of compliance make it difficult to deploy right information protection solution in finite budget.

In this post, we have elaborated on a detailed framework for deploying a robust information protection system.

The key to information protection is to focus on putting in place a clear data protection strategy, using the best possible guidelines, principles and tools. It helps building a solid information protection framework with clear guidelines, specific procedures to deal with potential breaches.

A security policy should encompass all software and hardware, physical parameters, human resources, information, and access control. A good information protection policy is always flexible enough to allow scope for revision and practical enough to be implemented easily.

Now you need to identify what are your core digital assets that includes data, systems and applications spread across the entire business value chain.

As a starting point, you can begin with these data categories:

This data can be employee ID, credit card numbers, bank account details, email messages/chats, vendor-related information or any other business-critical information.

Once you have a clear idea of your digital assets, categorise different data/information based on how critical they are in your business value chain. It will give you a clear picture of the crown jewels of various information assets. Now, you can use this information to label them based on their sensitivity or importance level.

Once you identify potential security risks associated with each digital asset, you’ll have a clear idea of the overall threat in the cloud ecosystem and what needs to be done. Then, you can take appropriate measures to protect these assets from both external and internal threats like unintentional sharing of confidential information to third-party or man-in-the-middle attacks.

Compliance always becomes an issue wherever sensitive consumer data is involved as it requires following certain mandatory legal regulations. Your organization may have to follow various regional and global data privacy regulations like GDPR & HIPAA that require you to protect, manage, and provide rights and control over various data as per the applicable regulation. For specific industries like financial services and healthcare, you’ll need to deal with even stricter critical compliance issues.

Final Thoughts

The purpose of information protection and deployment in the cloud environment is to put security policies in place to help you seamlessly identify, manage and protect core digital assets from cybersecurity threats. You need to identify your core data, where this data is moving in the cloud ecosystem, the risks associated with this data and how to prevent specific data files from being accessed by unauthorized parties.

The Cloud Factory Information Protection solution is built on a modern security architecture built on the top of Azure Information Protection that makes it easy to secure your business-critical information and handle compliance related issues. Our experts can help walk through the entire process with ease.

Would you like to know more about deploying information protection and what we can do for your organisation?
Get in touch with us at hello@tcf.cloud and we will be happy to assist you.