Why Data Integrity is the Key to Protecting Corporate Data

In this age of enterprise mobility and competiveness, there is a strong demand to have data and information available anywhere at any time. As a result, the majority of companies have embraced the trend of integrating tools such as Cloud and mobile services, chatbots and IoT devices to meet this demand. However, these applications bring a host of security threats for disclosing or leaking private company information like we have seen weekly over the last several years.

It’s clear data is an asset to businesses and holds a lot of weight to how successful a business can be. That is why it is vital for companies to take a look at how they are protecting data across their entire network.

Traditionally, security professionals within an organization identify the most sensitive information and pick and choose what information should be protected and selectively give access privileges to certain individuals. However, this approach to security is incredibly dated and does not hold up to the new cloud and mobile services companies and users alike are using to access and store data. As such, with the massive amount and constantly changing data that is flowing through a company’s network from various users and applications, it makes it difficult to manage the security of all this data.

With the heavy reliance on an open and integrated cloud environment to access their data, it’s critical for us as security professionals and technologists to look at what security tools are put in place currently and ask ourselves if we are doing it right and providing enough trust and security to enable organizations to allow their customers to use that data correctly. It’s time to take an approach that assumes all data is at risk from internal and external threats and focus on making data security a priority by combining the approach to weave the access to data with security from the start. If we don’t, we are going to lose our data.

What Does This Mean?

To make data security a priority, the core focus must be on protecting the data itself at the foundation level. Regardless of the user, it is important not to assume that every data request that comes in is from a trusted source. As such, at BOHH Labs we use a process that separates out every request from the requestor, and then use a combination of unique keyless end-to-end encryption, Artificial Intelligence technology, Natural Language Processing, and In-Memory Distributed Blockchain Ledger technology, to ensure the request gets checked at all points of vulnerability: the request, processing and backend data stores. This means every data request must be validated at each of these three points before moving forward, and never has direct access to the backend system so anyone coming on to the system is not able to hack their way through. This will allow companies to protect data no matter where it is being stored, accessed or transacted such as on on-premise databases, cloud platforms, IoT devices, mobile services and more.

Data is increasingly a critical part of businesses and consumers’ lives; thus, it’s essential to protect it without hindering the ability to actually use it. As such, at BOHH we believe it is time to revaluate how companies are securing the interaction with their data and make data access and security of it a priority to ensure companies can securely deploy innovative enterprise applications and cloud services without opening them up to massive, widespread, and malicious security threats.

Why Data Security Must Be Treated as a Core Business Value

- Ted West, BOHH Labs Chairman

What makes a company successful? Ask almost any enterprise today and they will tell you that strong revenue, a loyal base of customers and forward-thinking are the keys to ensuring long-term success. However, in our digitally-driven, cloud and mobile-dispersed business world, security is becoming a top priority for more and more organizations, especially for the customer, operations and transactions data they hold. When companies are hit with a data breach or expose sensitive data to “bad actors”, the ramifications can be huge: loss in customers, reimbursement to customers, legal fines and data recovery fees, or perhaps even something worse – damage to reputation. All of these repercussions of a data breach can greatly impact the success and revenue stream of a business, yet data security is still largely viewed as a role of the CIO, CISOs or whomever is in charge of the company’s security strategy.

Most CIOs acknowledge that cybersecurity is a core expectation of their leadership, yet many believe that companies still view security and risk management as mere “compliance chores” and a “cost of doing business.” Industry analysts report that more companies are increasing spending on security investments. However, if companies are making investment decisions in security simply based on implementing what meets the minimum requirements of securing data, and they are not looking at how these investments directly impact business strategy and the bottom line, they will likely fall short of what is needed. 

Data is an asset

It’s clear data is an asset to businesses and holds a lot of weight to how successful a business can be. It’s no secret that most businesses today are happy to put investments in to analyzing data to increase sales and market shares, but those analytics are not useful if business can’t keep their data protected. Business leaders, starting from the Board of Directors and moving through the C-suite, must insist on their organizations adapting the most effective security measures in their IT platforms and workflows and processes today keep the data they hold secure. Their success depends on it. They have no choice, and they should expect nothing less. While this task is not always easy, there is a great opportunity for those businesses who do place importance on keeping data protected and treating it like a core business value to gain a competitive advantage and strengthen their ability to keep the “bad actors” from compromising their good data, their customers’ trust and loyalty, and their critical brands.

Data security is becoming existential, no longer circumstantial, for many organizations

With the current climate of breaches revealed daily and the number and scope of attacks on the rise, organization leaders must start asking themselves: Is fixing a security breach that exposes millions of client records and brings financial and brand damage merely a “compliance chore”, or is it more than that? Is the investment needed to prevent such a breach from happening again a simple “cost of doing business”, or is it more than that? Is fixing a breach, or guarding against it in the first place, a strategic issue impacting the trust and reputation of the organization and its position to grow and retain a loyal base of customers? We think so.