The importance of data security and protecting your confidential information
Table of contents
The data-driven business
What is a data breach?
“CIA Triad” security principles
Physical security
Preserving confidentiality
Maintaining integrity
Ensuring availability
Encryption at rest and in transit
A note about data privacy
Examinations and certifications
Conclusion About Beeline
The data-driven business
Today’s most successful companies are data-driven. They rely on data to make objective business decisions and, increasingly, they incorporate data into every facet of their operation. The global consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that, by 2025, smart workflows and seamless interactions among humans and machines will be as standard as the balance sheet, and most employees will use data to optimize nearly every aspect of their work.1
In this environment, data is the most valuable asset to a business. No matter what industry you are in, it is critical to take care of your data, whether financial reports, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information (PII) of employees and contractors providing temporary services for your company. Despite increased data protection regulation and enhanced security procedures, the risk of data breaches is growing. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years.2
What is a data breach?
If a breach involves a violation of a regulatory or industry mandate, the regulatory body can impose fines or other penalties.
A data breach, or data leak, is a security event in which critical data is accessed by or disclosed to unauthorized viewers. Data breaches can happen due to:
• Cyber attacks in which hackers bypass your security technologies and get into your important software or your security platform
• Theft or loss of devices containing protected information
• Data theft by employees or other internal users, such as contractors or partners
• Human errors such as accidentally sending sensitive data to someone unauthorized to see it
In addition to the financial cost, a data breach can have other serious consequences. It can interrupt business operations, affecting company revenue. A breach can also involve legal costs, and if it involves a violation of a regulatory or industry mandate, the regulatory body can impose fines or other penalties. The organization can suffer lasting damage to its reputation and customer trust.
With all these risks, it is natural that businesses and companies like Beeline who support them with digital services are increasing their efforts to ensure data security.
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“CIA Triad” security principles
Maintaining data security is about more than simply hoarding data and guarding it. Data security, or information security, includes all the principles, policies, and practices to protect digital data or other kinds of information. It is based on three foundational principles, known by their initials as the CIA Triad:
• Confidentiality: has to do with keeping an organization’s data private. This means that only authorized users and processes should be able to access or modify data.
• Integrity: means that the data can be trusted. It should be maintained in a correct state, so that it may not be erased, modified, or otherwise corrupted. The company’s data should always be correct, authentic, and reliable.
• Availability: Just as unauthorized users should be kept out of an organization’s data, the data should be available to authorized users whenever they require it. This means keeping systems, networks, and devices up and running.
The physical security framework is made up of three main components: access control, surveillance, and testing.
Physical security
Ensuring data confidentiality, integrity, and availability starts with physical security. This can be defined as the protection of personnel, hardware, software, networks, and data from physical actions and events that could cause serious loss or damage to an organization.
The physical security framework is made up of three main components: access control, surveillance, and testing. The success of an organization’s physical security program can often be attributed to how well each of these components is implemented, improved, and maintained.
Access control
Access control encompasses the measures taken to limit exposure of facilities, networks, and data to authorized personnel only. These corporate barriers often include ID badges, keypads, and security guards. More sophisticated access controls involve technologies such as ID card scanners and near-field communication (NFC) that can verify the identities of individuals entering and exiting various facilities.
Access control is also applied to ensure that individuals are only allowed to access data and networks that allow them to do their jobs. The Principle of Least Privilege (POLP), described below, explains how this access control is applied.
Surveillance
Surveillance refers to the technology, personnel, and resources that organizations use to monitor their locations and facilities, including data centers. Surveillance resources typically include guards, sensors, and notification systems.
These systems are designed to deter or prevent physical security breaches, but they can also record events and provide evidence if an incident cannot be prevented, as in a natural disaster.
Testing
Physical security is a preventative measure and incident response tool. Disaster recovery plans, for example, center on the quality of one’s physical security protocols -- how well a company identifies, responds to, and contains a threat. The only way to ensure that such policies and procedures will be effective when the time comes is to implement active testing.
Testing is important, particularly to ensure that disaster recovery plans and procedures –including data backup and restoration protocols – operate smoothly and effectively. These policy tests should be conducted on a regular basis to practice role assignments and responsibilities and minimize the likelihood of mistakes.
Preserving confidentiality
Most organizations protect the confidentiality of their data by limiting access to only those people who need to use that data in their work. The most effective way to control access is by implementing a Zero Trust security model, where the POLP and micro-segmentation breaks data security perimeters into small zones and maintains separate access to each segment of data storage.
Zero Trust is a security framework requiring all users, whether in or outside the organization’s network, to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated before being granted access to applications and data. Zero Trust addresses the challenges of today’s business, including securing remote workers, hybrid cloud environments, and ransomware threats.
POLP states that individuals should be given only those privileges needed for them to complete their task. If a specific action requires that an individual’s access rights be augmented, those extra rights should be relinquished immediately upon completion of the action.
This is analogous to the “need to know” rule: if the individual does not need access to specific information to perform a task, they should not have the right to access that information.
Among the ways organizations preserve data confidentiality:
• Encrypt sensitive files
• Manage data access
• Physically secure devices and paper documents
• Securely dispose of data, devices, and paper records
• Manage data acquisition
• Manage data utilization
• Manage devices
Zero Trust addresses the challenges of today’s business, including securing remote workers, hybrid cloud environments, and ransomware threats.
Maintaining integrity
Data integrity protocols seek to maintain the overall consistency and reliability of data. Data integrity is a supporting component of data security alongside others like data validation and data quality. In the event of a malicious or unauthorized change in data, a system that adheres to the standards of data integrity should be able to answer questions such as which data changed, who changed the data, when was the data changed, and what permission level was required to change the data.
Data integrity protocols attempt to ensure that records are not corrupted during the entire period they are in existence. If they are corrupted, the protocols should identify and isolate the erroneous data and replace it with an uncorrupted backup maintained for this purpose.
Ensuring availability
Data availability is the process of ensuring that data is available to end users and applications, whenever and wherever they need it. It defines the degree or extent to which data is readily usable along with the necessary procedures, tools, and technologies required to make data available.
Data availability requirements are used to create service level agreements (SLA) and similar service contracts, which define and guarantee the service provided by third-party providers. Typically, data availability calls for implementing products, services, policies, and procedures that ensure that data is available in normal and disaster recovery situations. This is done by implementing data/storage redundancy, security, network optimization, and other processes and procedures.
Among the best practices typically incorporated into those processes and procedures are:
• Eliminate single points of failure. Every part of an organization’s infrastructure – and the infrastructure of those providing vital data services – should be continually backed up and reinforced. For the IT systems they rely on, businesses should review their architecture for solutions such as virtualization, redundancy, load balancing, and clustering.
• Prepare for a disaster. A disaster does not have to be a major earthquake or a hurricane. It can be a simple, localized power outage. Businesses can protect against disruptions in data availability by ensuring that all data is protected by server and storage redundancy and appropriate disaster recovery solutions.
• Engage in protective monitoring. Organizations should ensure that they and their software providers have services in place to proactively monitor the servers on which their data resides.
Encryption at rest and in transit
One of the best ways to keep data secure is to encrypt it at all times, whether it is at rest or in transit. In this regard, Beeline adheres to the AES-256 encryption standard, which has a key length of 256. Practically unbreakable based on current computing power, this is the strongest encryption standard.
Beeline utilizes whole disk encryption for data storage and additionally encrypts key PII fields in its database using the AES-256 encryption standard.
A note about data privacy
Data dealing with PII, such as individual personnel records or contingent workforce records must be handled with special care and attention. Laws like the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. 552a, as amended) in the U.S., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, and others, are designed to protect the privacy and human rights of individuals by regulating the use and processing of personal data.
Among their provisions, these laws shift the responsibility for protecting individual privacy onto the companies that control and process data that individuals have consented to provide. In some cases, such as GDPR, they also make it possible for individuals to withdraw that consent at any time and require the companies controlling and processing this data to remove it from their systems if requested.
Many of these laws give data subjects the right to access their data and know how their personal information is being processed. To avoid harsh penalties and costly fines, businesses must ensure that their IT systems and providers of IT services are fully compliant with the latest data privacy regulations.
Beeline adheres to the AES256 encryption standard, which has a key length of 256.
Examinations and certifications
Due to the complexity of global data security requirements, many companies regularly subject their systems to rigorous security audits and examinations. With multinational clients in diverse industries, Beeline participates in annual client security audits and on-site visits to satisfy our clients’ needs for vendor oversight.
Beeline undergoes annual SSAI 18/ISAE-3402 Type II SOC 1 and 2 and ISO 27001/1/17/18 audits, conducted by independent third parties. These audits and examinations ensure that Beeline’s data centers, network architecture, disaster recovery and response protocols, and other data security measures meet generally recognized U.S. and international standards.
ISO 27001 is a globally recognized standard for the establishment and certification of an information security management system (ISMS). Beeline has achieved the following ISO certifications:
• ISO/IEC 27001:2013 – Information security management systems requirements
• ISO/IEC 27017:2015 – Code of practice for information security controls based on ISO/IEC 27002 for cloud services
• ISO/IEC 27018:2019 – Code of practice for protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in public clouds acting as PII processors
Conclusion
Today, data security and privacy are often viewed as compliance issues, driven by regulatory mandates and concern for the risk of theft, loss, or damage that can affect employee productivity. In the data-driven organizations of the future, data privacy and security will be regarded as areas of required competency, driven by evolving regulatory expectations, increasingly high stakes of security incidents, and by competitive pressures.
Data-driven businesses will make the necessary investments in data privacy and security, and they will demand the same from their suppliers, to successfully provide their users with the data they need in near real time, vastly improving productivity.
For over 20 years, Beeline has empowered businesses worldwide to achieve competitive advantages with their extended workforce. Beeline Extended Workforce Platform gives companies the visibility needed to mitigate risk, achieve cost savings, and meet dynamic business needs. With tailored solutions that solely focus on the complexities of the extended workforce, clients leverage Beeline products that fit their unique requirements. Through thousands of integrations, clients can connect their extended workforce data from all technology stacks, including major procurement and HR systems.
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