Data management is an important part of the administrative system of any organization or enterprise for it to run smoothly. The process of data management includes acquiring data, validating it, as well as storing and protecting it effectively.

While acquiring data is often easy enough, the management of data, however, is not. Amongst the various challenges that are faced in the task of Data Management, one of the most prominent is the threat of data loss.

National Cyber Security alliance states that almost half (50 %) of the cyber attacks target companies with less than 2500 employees.
To address this concern, a number of ways for Secure Data Management have been devised over the years. Here are 5 tips that you should follow to secure your data:

Secure data in transit and at rest: 

• Data that is being moved from one location to another is known as data in transit, or data in motion.
• To ensure that the integrity and confidentiality of such data remain uncompromised, essential data protection and control methods must be employed.
• Security parameters installed on the networking plane will effectively stop the unauthorized movement of data.
• Loss of personally identifiable information is risky and the administrators must be immediately notified in case any such incidences occur.
• Configure web application firewalls to protect vulnerable applications from attacks that mainly target private resources.
• Containerized data is a form of data at rest and can be stored as either as an external file system (in volume, bind-mounts, or tempfs) or in the container with the help of a specialized storage driver. The containers each have their pros and cons. Care should be taken while selecting the right type of storage.
• Use multiple levels of protection, along with file-system level encryption as is required to protect your data from being visible to prying eyes.

Manage your metadata well for maximum security: 

• Metadata is generated every time data is acquired, updated, added to, or deleted from a system. It includes all the information about the generated data like date of creation, file size, the name of the author as well as any recent modification done on the data.
• Metadata Management Solutions assist in building data lineage and tracking capabilities, metadata ingestion and translation, frameworks for data, etc.
• The various number of management tools available offers a portal that is safe and secure for data management.

Carefully monitor your data and lock your file-systems: 

• Create a plan to dispose of old data securely by building a data life cycle management plan.
• Identify the data to be protected and assign a time period over the duration of which the particular data is protected.
• Make an inventory of all the hardware that can possibly store data. Assess and discard them effectively to ensure no data leaks outside.
• Ensure the file-system is locked. Read-only data is not editable. Thus, a locked file-system prevents the chance of making accidental changes to data that is sensitive in nature. It effectively prevents the host system from flooding.

Don’t publicize sensitive information and restrict kernel capabilities:

• The process of container building and customizing it should be separate from each other.
• For example, the steps needed to build a container should not have copied keys or confidential information to prevent it from being accidentally incorporated into a version control system.
• The configuration should be kept to a minimum and sensitive keys or tokens at run time.
• Use the safety checks provided by various Kernel security modules for additional protection and management of application requiring enabling or disabling of default security controls.

Use a compliance framework to reduce the risk of data theft:

• To manage compliance in a contained environment, a number of challenges must be overcome within a limited time period.
• A compliance framework enables you to ensure the confidentiality, accessibility, and integrity of data at all times by securing the file-system, network and processes involved.
• Aside from the steps mentioned above for securing data and prevention of data-stealing, there is also a risk of human errors and interactions. To mitigate such concerns, take the following measures to ensure its prevention.
• Publicize information to the employees strictly on a need-to-know basis. Limit access to certain data sets to only authorized employees. 
• Make sure that your network security is strong enough to deal with threats like malware, viruses, etc.
• Educate your employees about the necessity of data protection and the ramifications of a security breach. Make sure everyone in the company understands and recognizes malware in disguise in the form of unsolicited or junk mails.
• Employees must be aware of all the possible ways at their disposal to ensure the security of sensitive data aside from passwords.
• Focusing on outside threats too much leads attention away from the fact that breaches can occur as a result of human errors inside the organization as well. Increase user-friendly technologies that are less prone to errors without preventing the productivity of the employees.