Data storage security involves safeguarding storage systems and the sensitive data they hold—whether that’s on-site, in remote data centers, or in the cloud. In this article, we’ll show you why storage security needs to be a high priority and what best practices you should take into account.

Why Is Data Storage Security Important?

Storage security prevents data from being accidentally or intentionally damaged, destroyed, or exposed to unauthorized access and misuse. 

Organizations today collect, process, and store massive amounts of sensitive information, including personal data, financial records, and intellectual property. 

Failing to secure this data adequately can lead to disastrous consequences, such as data breaches, financial losses, reputational damage, and legal liabilities. It can also disrupt a company’s business operations due to unintended downtime which can have downstream effects on website availability or order fulfillment, for example.

Even accidental neglect can result in unintended exposure of sensitive data. Depending on the nature of the security incident or compromise, this could have wide-reaching implications, including hefty non-compliance fines, loss of customer trust, or even competitive disadvantage due to intellectual property theft.

The Threats to Storage Security

Malicious actors know that many organizations are lacking the right storage security and going after them with a variety of threats and tactics. This includes attacks such as:

Insider threats: This can come from disgruntled employees, compromised employees, or former employees who have access to sensitive data or can provide a malicious actor with the information needed to compromise a company.

Ransomware: Ransomware attacks continue to be at an all-time high, with ransomware payments hitting $1 billion for the first time last year. These attacks can lock an organization out of their files, severely disrupting business operations and leading to potential downtime unless a ransom is paid.

APT (advanced persistent threats) attacks: These are long-term attacks that can be initiated via a database compromise. An attacker finds their way in undetected, lays the foundation to stay within an organization long-term, and creates backdoors, exfiltrates data, or spies on a company, with potentially devastating results.

Significant consequences, like downtime and reputational damage, can arise from these attacks, which is why it’s important to ensure that storage security is part of the overall cybersecurity strategy. This includes protecting against these common attacks and also having a strategy in place that secures data at rest, in transit, and during use. This isn’t just sound cybersecurity practice but will keep your organization in compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.

Best Practices for Storage Security

Effective management of storage security should go beyond a tactical level and include an organizational and strategic perspective. This includes adopting a multi-layered security approach to address the various threats to storage security such as endpoint security, network security, and robust backups for downtime prevention.

Overall, as you work to develop and implement your storage security strategy, prioritize the following:

Maintaining complete visibility

Do you know who has access to what? Data access transparency is crucial. This includes understanding where your data is stored, how it’s used, who has access to it, and what vulnerabilities may exist in your storage infrastructure. You’ll usually want to enforce the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) (limit user access rights to the minimum necessary for their job functions), but you can only do that if you have transparency first. 

Involve key stakeholders

Effective storage security is a cross-functional effort so make sure you’re involving key stakeholders from different departments, like developers, legal, HR, and operations. This will help you identify potential challenges with implementation while maintaining strong relationships that will help enforce your policies and processes.

Train Your Staff

Continually educate and train your staff on security best practices and the latest threats. This is crucial to mitigate the risk of insider threats and to reinforce the human element of your security posture.

Conduct Regular Audits and Penetration Testing

Regularly auditing your storage environments and conducting penetration testing are critical to uncovering vulnerabilities and security gaps. These practices help ensure your defenses are always up to date against emerging threats.

Adopt a multi-layered approach

Effective storage security doesn’t stop at prevention. Consider it in its full spectrum – from ransomware detection and monitoring to response and recovery and work from there. This will help guide you to finding the right tools and prioritizing the right systems to plug in any identified gaps.

Avoid Complacency

Your storage security is a continuous process — implementing a strategy once and never revisiting it is an easy way to succumb to new attacks and leave new areas of your organization unsecured. Avoid complacency and have a process that will reassess your current strategy.

Tools for Storage Security

Effective storage security requires not only robust policies and processes but also the right set of tools. These tools help manage internal and external threats, enforce security protocols, and mitigate risks. Here’s a list of essential tools that you should consider integrating into their security strategy:

1. Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) protect the network perimeter, monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic, and can block suspicious activity based on predefined security rules.
2. Data Encryption Tools encrypting data at rest and in transit, ensuring that sensitive information is unreadable to unauthorized users.
3. Identity and Access Management (IAM) Tools control access to resources, ensuring only authorized users can access certain data or systems, based on their roles and privileges.
4. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Tools analyze security alerts and help cybersecurity teams detect and respond to anomalies.
5. Threat Detection: CryptoSpike by ProLion monitors your storage for signs of suspicious behavior and blocks attacks instantly. By detecting and preventing ransomware attacks in real-time at the storage level, CryptoSpike acts as a last line of defense, ensuring comprehensive protection for your organization’s data.

By leveraging these tools, organizations can enhance their storage security and better protect themselves against cyber threats. Each tool plays a specific role in a multi-layered defense strategy that can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches and other cyber incidents.

Take Your Storage Security to the Next Level

Don’t wait for a breach. The time to safeguard your organization’s valuable data is now. 

Want to learn more about how ProLion’s CryptoSpike protects your storage system against attacks? Watch the demo or get in touch with our team.