A Comparison Between Data Security, Privacy, and Protection
July 1st, 2024 | 3 min. read
By Jordan Pioth
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If your organization has poor data security, sensitive data stored in your network can be compromised leading to data breaches. This results in data potentially being accessed by unauthorized malicious users.
Sensitive data being compromised can lead to damaged business reputations and potential legal consequences when regulations governing your industry are compromised. Additionally, this can lead to lost customers and revenue.
For these reasons, it is important to take data security seriously in your organization to avoid data breaches and the consequences that result from them. Understanding the differences between data security, privacy, and protection will enable you to determine which of these will benefit your organization.
Coeo understands how important reliable network security is and has helped thousands of organizations secure their data to avoid data breaches and sensitive data from being compromised.
By the end of this article, you will understand what data security is, what data privacy is, what data protection is, the differences between these solutions, and which of these might be most beneficial for your organization.
What is data security?
Data security protects data from malicious actors to prevent theft and corruption. Data security enables your organization to utilize access management controls to provide users with access to specific data.
Data security also encrypts data regardless of whether it is being stored, sent, or received to ensure that data is secure no matter where it is within your network.
Data security involves detailed procedures and policies to better secure data and allow authorized users to access the data safely.
What is data privacy?
Data privacy refers to how data is being collected, used, shared, managed, and protected. Data privacy allows you to set rules and regulations on how data is handled and maintained to ensure it is handled appropriately to maintain secure data.
It is important to educate your employees on the importance of data privacy and give them ways to handle data so they do not expose it to unauthorized malicious users.
What is data protection?
Data protection utilizes the technologies, practices, and processes that impact data ensuring it is available when needed.
Various technical assets can be included in proper data protection such as storage hardware, availability mechanisms such as data backups and data protection, and data storage tiering.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about data security or ask any questions you may have you can schedule an appointment.
The difference between data security, privacy, and protection
Although data security, privacy, and protection services sound similar and share the same objective of ensuring the safety of your data, they all have different strategies to accomplish this goal.
The strategies driving data security, privacy, and protection include:
Data security
Data security aims to ensure data is secure by preserving its integrity. Data security ensures that only authorized users have access to the data to protect it from malicious actors to prevent data theft and corruption.
Data privacy
Data privacy aims to provide more control over your data. Data privacy addresses the use of data to ensure data is managed in the proper way to avoid vulnerabilities that result in data breaches and sensitive data being compromised or corrupted.
Data protection
Data protection ensures the data is available for access only to authorized users. Data protection ensures the preservation of information from data creation to its destruction.
Data protection is typically a strategy that an organization follows to ensure data is handled and maintained safely to avoid it from being compromised or corrupted.
Which of these is most beneficial for your organization?
Now you understand what data security, privacy, and protection are as well as the differences between them.
However, it is also important to determine which strategy is most beneficial to improve data security and prevent data breaches and sensitive data from being compromised and corrupted.
If your organization is looking to improve its data security by implementing security solutions and services that prevent vulnerabilities and data breaches, a data security solution like SASE may be a good choice for your organization.
However, if your organization is looking for greater control over your data and is looking to set rules and regulations for how data is handled internally to improve data security and avoid data breaches, implementing data privacy may be the better choice.
Alternatively, a data protection strategy is a good solution if you require that data is secured and available for use only by authorized users within your organization.
If your organization is looking to maximize data security and wants to ensure there are no vulnerabilities, you can implement all three strategies concurrently in your organization at the same time.
Conversely, if your organization does not have any data vulnerabilities and is not at risk of a data breach, none of these data security strategies may be necessary.
Determining what service is most beneficial for your organization
Now you understand what data security, privacy, and protection are, the differences between them, and which service would be most beneficial for your organization.
This will help you understand the importance of data security and enable you to determine which service is the best choice.
No organization can afford to deal with poor data security that results in data breaches.
Compromised or corrupted data caused by a data breach can lead to a damaged business reputation and ramifications caused by failure to comply with industry regulations placed on your organization that can lead to legal consequences.
To avoid these consequences, it is important to prioritize network security. Understanding what data security, privacy, and protection and the differences between them will help you determine which will be beneficial for your organization.
Coeo understands how important reliable data security is and has helped thousands of organizations secure their data to avoid breaches that lead to sensitive data being compromised or corrupted.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about data security or ask any questions you may have you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you understand what data security, privacy, and protection are, the differences between them, and which one is most beneficial for your organization, read this article to understand what the top data security threats are and how to avoid them:
When he's not creating content for Coeo, Jordan loves to watch sports, hang out with friends and family, and anything sneaker-related.