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Ideas to Keep Sensitive Data Secure From Running Away to Public Cloud

  author
Written By Ashwani Tiwari
Mack John
Approved By Mack John  
Published On July 10th, 2019
Reading Time 4 Minutes Reading

The strategic monitoring of officials’ use of online services adds an extra security layer for higher education premises. Organizations should adopt at least basic security measures to keep sensitive data secure from public sharing.

Just imagine of a scenario that how many online services you use every day. There are chances that it’s the mixture of services handled by your employer and other business officials whom you have chosen to implement in your personal life. Being an IT executive, you may be capable of managing different internet worlds separately but, it is simple for non-IT individuals to unwillingly mix data of office with the personal ones. When such a scenario happens in the absence of IT staff, the organization is at extreme risk of data breaches, cybercrimes, or public disclosure of sensitive information. Especially for companies, its now time to learn and employ the methods for faculty and staff management who use business online services. This helps in addressing data breaches and repatriate incorrect exposed data.

4 Tips to Keep Sensitive Data Secure In Business

1. Use Google Alerts for Accidental Disclosures – Some of the most embarrassing and harmful leakages of sensitive data occurs when officials unwillingly post them online. For example – in the year 2017, an educational data warehousing company Schoolzilla performed some storage misconfigurations in the bucket of Amazon web services. This misconfiguration enabled the public to access their sensitive content. This small mistake resulted in the exposure of educational data covering leakage of around 1.3 million students records.

In order to keep sensitive data secure, the admin department team can create strategic Google alerts to observe the presence of confidential data. For example – a look for “+site: yourschool.edu +SSN” can offer an early alert of locations where officials have unfortunately exposed SSN to search engines.

2. Outsource Sensitive Data Security to CASB – Management of cloud service permissions and its use is a time-consuming work, which can rapidly workload IT staff. A CASB (or cloud access security broker) solution relieves customers from some of the major difficulties by rendering a centralized platform to manage multiple cloud services at a time. These third-party solutions monitor activities performed on cloud storage and keep a continuous eye on sensitive data. They address the occurrence of a security policy violation (if any), inappropriate permissions to access business resources, misuse of confidential information, and other malicious activities. For staff, cloud access security broker solutions serve as a force multiplier by automating data monitoring and policy enforcement activities on a 24*7 basis.

3. Audit Permissions for Enabled Cloud Services – When you permit an employee to use approved online services, ensure that you have audited service permissions to be safe from accidental data exposure situations. For example – a faculty person may share students’ details with an individual simply by uploading the Excel file online and allowing him or her to access it through a shared link. If he / she gets permissions to only read that Excel sheet, undoubtedly the organization loses file access control. In order to keep sensitive data secure even after sharing them, admins should organize daily audits of online services permissions, giving special focus to shared documents, and those shared with the business partners.

4. Enforce Cloud Data Loss Prevention Technology – One of the best approaches to completely stop accidental data loss incidents in cloud computing, is to prevent that information from reaching online on the public cloud. A data loss prevention technology monitors the user’s activity on an endpoint and the entire business network, looking for the practices used to transfer sensitive data. For example – a cloud DLP system may address an executive uploading a graded document to his personal account with the mindset of working on it at home. Before the grade file leaves the network, the available DLP solution blocks this uploading procedure and notifies an administrator about the same. This example clearly demonstrates that there is an important role of DLP solutions in stopping the distribution of sensitive cloud data publicly.

Work With Full Concentration While Working Online

Either it is IT staff or non-IT staff, it is the major role of enterprise’s owners to keep sensitive data secure from being shared publicly. They have to train their employees with the solutions that are needed to protect confidential information from data breaches or crimes. Organizations should conduct awareness and training sessions on a regular basis and, deeply analyze and monitor the activities performed by their employees. In short, businesses have to adopt ‘zero-trust model’ on their premises to achieve cloud data security!