What strategies can you employ to prevent customer data breaches?

You can't 'prevent' a data breach, at least from a true security sense. You can mitigate or work to reduce the likelihood, but the fact is no one should feel overly confident. Its better to pursue a strategy of strong encryption for data at rest and using smart controls around access and to operate with the least amount of customer data necessary.

As mentioned, establishing a comprehensive policy is the first line of defense. From my experience, documenting and approving a policy does not fully prevent data breaches in the organization. The approved policy needs to be communicated within the organization and to third parties- vendors and contractors. The roles and expected responsibilities for each stakeholders should be clearly communicated. As the common saying, “security is everyone responsibility. Employees should also acknowledge that they have read and understood the policy. Employee confirmation should obtained one a year.

Well, RBAC is already covered, so other fundamental requirements are 1) to Implement the principle of least privilege, ensuring that employees and third-parties only have access to the data and systems necessary for their roles; 2) to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all access to critical systems and data repositories containing customer information; and to review and revoke unnecessary access privileges, on a regular basis, especially for terminated employees or third-party vendors (i.e., SOX 404, ITGC control along with separation of duties (SOD) to prevent unauthorized access/misuse of customer data.

Preventing customer data breaches involves encrypting data, controlling access, conducting regular security audits, and training employees on security practices. Additionally, minimize data collection, develop secure software, protect the network, back up data, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Beyond encrypting data at rest and in transit, the key used for encryption should be adequately secured. Dedicated key management solution such as AWS Key Management Service (KMS) can be used to store, manage, and rotate the keys. Additionally, robust access control should be implemented which includes multi-factor authentication, role-based access control and auditing.

Know your customers, critical assets (a.k.a., golden nuggets), HW/SW inventory starting from BIA, business/IT environment, and compliance, regulatory requirements and then establish a dedicated incident response team with the necessary skills and resources (e.g., SIEM, playbook, etc.) to respond effectively to security incidents in compliance your requirements. Develop and regularly test your incident response plan that outlines roles, responsibilities, and procedures for detecting, containing, recovering from data breaches and executing communication/crisis management plan (i.e., in coordination with leadership, communication, legal team, etc.). For your leadership team, regular tabletop exercises to ensure preparedness can help.

Make sure what source data (i.e., too many security technologies deployed at where/what layer) you need to digest and inject into SIEM and monitor, detect, and respond in real-time. (BTW, SIEM with TI + SOAR + UEBA should be integrated, all togeher) Leverage security analytics and user behavior analytics to identify and investigate suspicious activities or patterns (user and device anomaly detection) that may indicate a breach. Regularly perform vulnerability assessments and penetration testing to identify and remediate weaknesses in your systems and applications. Also, plan and build a buffer/extra capacity for your SOC and/or MSSP, so it can handle the crisis/spike when the sky is falling.