Data Security - Why your data is so important & how to keep it safe.

Data security is all about the protective privacy measures applied to a business to prevent unauthorised access to databases containing sensitive and personal data.

As CEO and Group CTO of a software company that holds and processes data for our clients, data security is top priority amongst our business processes.

Facebook, British Airways, Westpac. All of these global companies service millions of customers per year and all have had a data breach in the past 10 months. What causes them to fall vulnerable to a data breach? Inadequate data security measures.

The Westpac data breach showed cyber criminals breaching the PayID platform to gather information on customers, opening up the potential for a secondary hack on customer’s bank accounts. The data breach saw almost 100,000 innocent Australian’s private details exposed, all due to inadequate data security measures by Westpac.

Data security changes as technology evolves; new software and products are released each day to keep your data secure but selecting the right measures for your business is what will keep your data safe. 

In the recent Instagram breach, “influencer’s” contact details were taken; 49 million profiles with millions of followers breached due to inadequate data security measures. With large amounts of data, it is possible to uncover hidden patterns and correlations, using this they can refine their marketing and increase their sales.

Those in control of the data have the real data, they keep the information on what you are buying, where you are buying it from, your purchasing habits - everything that they can use to commoditise and consolidate the data and sell it. There must be set rules and regulations around access and storage of data to stop data breaches by hackers wanting to exploit that data.

There are now new data security laws in Australia and UK (GDPR) and as an international SaaS company we must ensure that our processes and security measures are up-to-date and effective. Currently our data is hosted in the cloud on infrastructure that is an ISO 27001 data centre and we are currently investigating the implementation of Blockchain technology to further guarantee the validity of our user’s information.

I believe that Blockchain technology will be revolutionary to many industries and will change the way sensitive data is stored and it is a must have technology where data provenance is required. Blockchain storage is essentially is a distributed ledger of blocks of data that are linked by cryptography; secret codes that link the blocks together and are immutable. A Blockchain solution lacks centralised points of vulnerability that computer hackers can exploit.

Ensuring our clients not just feel but know their data is secure is of extreme importance to me and our company.