Imagine a jewellery shop, where the jewels represent data. To protect the jewels from within, the shop owner follows specific policies and rules such as hiding the jewels when there are no customers. To protect the jewels from the outside, the owner installs reinforced doors and windows.
The first equates to information security, and the second to cybersecurity.
As our lives become increasingly digital every day, our information landscape is ever more complex. This is reflected in the amount of data in our world, which is growing by an average of 22.5% per year On top of that, laws are being passed to ensure data safety and rights around personal data, which adds another layer of complexity.
Cybersecurity vs. information security
We rely on cybersecurity and information security to secure our information. While cybersecurity focuses on protecting our information from the outside by guarding against cyberattacks, ransomware, and spyware, information security focuses on protecting information on the inside. It protects data from unauthorised access, modification, and disclosure. Rules help to prevent, correct, and detect information security risks and compliance risks.
The basics of information security
What does information security actually consist of? Here are the three basic principles:
- Privacy and confidentiality: protecting sensitive and/or personal data from being accessed or disclosed to unauthorised individuals or entities.
- Integrity and authenticity: ensuring that data remains complete, accurate, and unaltered throughout its lifecycle, preventing unauthorised modifications or corruption.
- Availability: maintaining accessibility and usability of systems, applications, and data, so operations and access for authorised users are uninterrupted.
Information security and governance
Good governance is key to controlling and managing risk and compliance while implementing these principles. This requires rules that consist of policies, procedures, and processes built on the outcome of:
- Data classification: to understand the information being used and stored, data must be categorised. This can be done based on metadata such as content, file type, sensitivity, etc. The classified data will give insights into the data’s importance and sensitivity. Once the value of the data is known, necessary measures can be taken to protect the information from misuse.
- Information life cycle management: to manage and control information, the life cycle of data must be determined from the moment the information is created until it is disposed of or archived. By applying rules on how information is distributed and stored while in use, you can effectively reduce the volume of non-essential information and therefore help to reduce storage costs, prevent data loss, and improve legal compliance. Knowing the data life cycle means knowing how to manage roles and responsibilities within your information organisation.
- Access management: access must be restricted to protect information from unlawful use. To ensure that only users with a user name and password have access to the information they need, establish a framework of processes, policies, and system settings to control and monitor access to data, resources, and systems. This will improve the detection of anomalies, security threats, and breaches, while complying with regulatory requirements.
Extra challenges: AI and sustainability
Implementing the three basic principles of information security is a challenge in itself. But as the exponential growth of data demands more storage capacity, our carbon footprint will grow too.
We should consider the positive impact of information security on an organisation as not only protection but also from a sustainability perspective, by reducing the amount of non-essential data and therefore reducing storage capacity.
With AI entering the field of information security, more and more organisations can also automate security measures that will improve the speed of detection and prevention. However, AI is still an emerging technology and a self-learning system. As such, human intervention is needed to control and manage information security to avoid undermining data authenticity.
To stay ahead of future developments and be able to manage and control information landscapes, organisations need to implement information security measures now to avoid increasing risks and costs. What measures have you planned or already taken? Drop me a line and let me know! I’d be happy to share my thoughts with you.