Summary: Traditional data management, duplicate files and folders, and infinite digital trash, all contribute to the high cost of maintenance and compliance threats. This blog defines how secure data erasure forms a part of the data remediation process to segregate unwanted data from the organization in order to meet compliance goals.
Data remediation helps businesses clean up, organize, and efficiently move their data to a secure and clean environment. The bulk volume of data that an organization accumulates over the years must be stored, managed, and optimized appropriately. Data Sanitization is a part of Data Remediation process and an important aspect while cleaning data stored on devices that shouldn’t be overlooked as it plays a vital role in preventing data breaches. If the data accuracy, storage, and security suffers, it can lead to data theft and non-compliance issues that may result in huge amount of financial and legal penalties.
Most people assume data remediation as the procedure of deleting unwanted business data that is no longer needed by the organization. However, in reality, data remediation is about structuring data, rectifying errors and flaws to preserve only high quality business information as per need and law. Take a look at the different stages of data remediation to maintain privacy and security.
Stages of Data Remediation
- Data Assessment: The first stage is to assess data volume in order to determine the time, effort, and resources required to maintain it.
- Data Segmentation: In the second stage all data needs to be segmented as all records created cannot be treated equally, and stored with same level of protection. Business confidential information requires high level of security especially to protect customers, investors and employees records to prevent compliance issues.
- Data Classification: This is the next stage to organize both structured and unstructured information based on business requirements. Data can be bifurcated as internal, confidential or restricted, depending on its level of sensitivity. For example, personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI) and financial information will need to be classified as High sensitive data or Restricted data.
- Data Migration: This is an essential stage to move information from a legacy storage environment that has reached end of life to a new cleansed storage that is accessible with improved security.
- Data Cleansing: The business information that is no longer required needs to be eradicated from storage devices. Unregularized data can overburden the organizational data network and may add to risk of data leakage and non-compliance issues. Using adequate data sanitization method is the most desirable approach to perform data cleansing and mitigating risks.
Benefits of Data Remediation
Successful accomplishment of the data remediation process proves beneficial to the organizations across all sectors. The following are the key benefits that can be derived from this process:
- Reduce Costs: Organization will reduce overall costs of storing and managing data with data remediation process being undertaken at regular intervals.
- Protection of Sensitive Data: Segmenting and Classifying data will help protect highly confidential information and take actions accordingly to mitigate risk.
- Prevent Penalties: Data Breach Risks, financial loss through fines, lawsuits, and brand damage can be prevented with structuring of data and cleansing process.
- Compliance with Laws and Regulations: Hanging on to data that is beyond its recommended retention period can create greater risks. By cleaning up data, your organization reduces data exposure which supports compliance initiatives.
- Mitigate Risks of Data Leakage: Not only structured data, the process of remediation also helps in protecting unstructured but equally sensitive information by performing its periodic technical evaluation. It helps in mitigating the risk of data leakage by permanently erasing the information no longer in use. Thereby, the possibility of sensitive data falling in wrong hands remain negligible.
- Saves Time and Resources: Data remediation accelerates retrieval of relevant information and make it available to the teams in a structured format. As a result, with minimum time and resources, various teams can effectively access data.
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Role of Data Sanitization in Remediation Process
Data protection and privacy laws are constantly emerging and updating. Organization must stay aware of the changes in the legal obligations to efficiently drive their data remediation efforts. As part of the data cleansing obligation in the remediation process, organizations must ensure that their media sanitization efforts are compliant with global sanitization standards. These global standards for media sanitization ensures that all target data is destroyed beyond recovery and without leaving any trace of information behind. Professional and certified data erasure tools like BitRaser ensure that data is securely erased across all hard drives – make and models, SSDs, and servers beyond recovery by adhering to global erasure standards. Permanent data sanitization thus ensures high level of data security, compliance and prevents any scope of data breach.
Conclusion
The volume of data accumulated by an organization over the years is on a tremendous rise. There is a growing need to ensure that the data is clean, organized, secure and compliant with data protection regulations. Data remediation aids in improving the quality of information stored by employing data segmentation, classification, secure handling and cleansing of information. Thus, no organization today can afford to ignore data remediation as it reduces dirty data, storage footprints and associated costs. Organizations can ensure that their sensitive data is highly secure and does not fall into wrong hands by opting for permanent data sanitization at the cleansing stage of data remediation.
