What is Information Security and Why is it Needed
Information is one of the most significant asset for any organization. For an organization, information serves great purposes and is of significant value hence should be tightly secured. Security is to join frameworks, tasks and interior controls to guarantee confidentiality and integrity of information. Information security history starts with the historical backdrop of computer security. It began around the year 1980. In 1980, the use of PCs had increased and more focus was laid on computer centers because back then, people did not have this much access.
In spite of the fact that the transparency of the Internet empowered organizations to rapidly adopt technology to grow, it likewise demonstrated to be an incredible shortcoming from an information security viewpoint. Here is what is information security, why is information security needed, and how to ensure it.
What is Information Security?
Information Security isn’t tied in with verifying and protecting information from unauthorized access. Information Security is essentially the act of preventing the information from being accessed by the unauthorized source as well as misuse and manipulation. Information can be physical or digital. Information can be anything: your personal information like name, cell phone number, your biometrics, and social media account, your bank details and so on. Information Security ranges a significant number of research fields like cryptography, mobile computing, Cyber crime investigation, online social media analytics and so hence and so forth.
Principles of Information Security
Confidentiality
Information is only accessed by those who have the right to access the information. Just the individuals who are approved to access delicate information can access it. Envision your bank account details, only you should have the access and representatives at the bank who are helping you with a transaction should have the option to access them and nobody else should.
Integrity
Information is maintained to be accurate and complete throughout its lifecycle. Integrity ensures that the information is edited by only authorized persons, it remains unaltered and the source of the information should be genuine and remains in its original state when at rest. For example, an attacker can shop on your site and vindictively change the costs of your items, so they can purchase anything at whatever cost they pick. This is where the integrity is compromised, because the information—in this situation, the cost of an item—has been altered without your consent.
Availability
Information is available to everyone who can access at any time. For example, an employee’s data needs to be accessed in order to check his sick leaves remaining, this will require collaboration from different teams like network, human resources, etc. Availability can be ensured by hardware and software implementation. However, when the attackers are unable to target the aforementioned principles, they tend to target the third principle using the Distributed denial of service attack.
These three principles may be used differently in different applications. For a national defense system, the main concern may be to ensure the confidentiality, for a money transfer system, the concern may be to ensure integrity. However, a bank system may require all three controls of the CIA framework.
Why is Information security needed?
The information security empowers the protected activity executed on the association’s Information Technology (IT) frameworks. This is on the grounds that to ensure the information, the association will apply or introduce the techniques that will protect the information, for example, antivirus, firewalls and others security applications. In this way, information security is significant in an association to ensure the applications that are running in the organization is secure as well as the information that is stored in PC too.
Information security will make sure that the information gathered by organizations is properly used. If the information is left unprotected, the information can be accessed by anybody. On the off chance that the information falls into inappropriate hands, it can disturb lives, affect business’s image and growth and can likewise be utilized to do harm. Information security will guarantee that no harm is done to any organization via its information.
Information security must encompass all the aspects of a business. Information security isn’t an IT issue any more nor is it an administration or HR issue. Information security is a business issue. A displeased worker is similarly as risky as an attacker
Information security is a lifecycle discipline. So as to be viable, your information security program must be regularly changing, continually advancing and constantly improving. Organizations and the conditions they work in are always showing signs of change. A business that doesn’t adjust is dead. An information security program that doesn’t adjust is dead. This is another point to emphasize on the implementation of information security constantly. Maybe your organization hasn’t planned as well as executed an information security program yet, or possibly your organization has composed a couple of arrangements and that was that. When is the perfect time for it? The perfect time is NOW!
How to ensure information security?
When running a business, the most important thing is your data and at no cost you want to put it at stake. Here are a few ways in which information can be secured:
- Make information security a top concern
Through straightforward, simple to pursue security strategies, you can prepare your workers on information security best practices. Also, you could select a safety committee to help keep security issues a core interest.
- Set up a solid firewall
So as to have a secure system, firewalls are an absolute necessity. A firewall secures your system by controlling web traffic coming into and streaming out of your business. Though they don’t help you guarantee pure safety but they’re still quite a standard no matter how you look at it.
- Keep physical information secure
Keep your business’s physical information by just enabling certain staff to deal with it. Do not give access to anyone or anybody unless they are trusted. Monitor who has dealt with any sensitive records and when.
- Destroy hard drives
This may had you like “oooh” but it is one of the best way to be totally certain that your sensitive information doesn’t fall into inappropriate hands. Know that numerous office hardware, presently contain hard drives that store information, not simply PCs.
- Promote awareness among coworkers
Some major data breaches in the history were the result of human error. Employees still fall prey to phishing tricks, click on malware that can taint your whole PC framework, etc. In order to protect your data, you have to make sure that your employees are aware of these threats and latest trends. You can conduct workshops or you can encourage them to enroll in different information security courses provided by reputed websites and institutes. InfoSec Academy’s information security courses are known to be the best among all, however, the final call should be yours and definite.
These are the few ways in which you can enable security for your business’ information. In this blog, we have not only covered what information security is but we have also proposed a few tactics to implement it. We hope that it is useful for you!
