There are over 17 billion internet-connected devices in the world — and experts expect that number will surge to almost 30 billion by 2030.

This rapidly growing digital ecosystem makes it increasingly challenging to protect people’s privacy. Attackers only need to be right once to seize databases of personally identifiable information (PII), including payment card information, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers.

In addition to the ever-present cybersecurity threats, data security teams must consider the growing list of data compliance laws and regulations.

Here are three strategies to tackle data security challenges in 2024.

1. Assure privacy

Security teams must make privacy paramount to reduce the risks of identity theft and fraud. For example, physicians require access to comprehensive patient health data, while billing clerks can only see insurance numbers and addresses.

Here are a few ways to assure data privacy:

• Encrypt your personal and customer data to make it unreadable to unauthorized users
• Conduct regular security audits to identify weak points and reduce the risk of data breaches
• Adopt a zero trust security model to minimize the chance of unauthorized access.

IBM Guardium Insights helps sharpen your focus on genuine privacy risks. This platform offers risk-based alerts and analytics, allowing you to detect and respond to data threats. With this vigilant approach, you can keep all stakeholders informed as you defend customer privacy.

IBM Guardium Data Encryption helps you encode your sensitive information and provides granular control to select individuals in your organization.

2. Address vulnerabilities

Cybersecurity is not a set-and-forget task — you must strive for constant improvements. Unfortunately, many organizations have security technologies that don’t communicate well with each other.

The executive director of IBM Corp, Ram Parasuraman, asserts that “the longer these silos exist, the longer it’s going to take us to respond to those attacks.”

Here are a few ways to address vulnerabilities:

• Install antivirus programs and firewalls and conduct regular scans to find and eliminate issues in the earliest stages.
• Release new software updates to patch vulnerabilities before threat actors find issues. You may need to modify in-house programs to adapt them for use with new technologies.
• Establish clear incident response protocols to make it easy for anyone to report security incidents, minimizing downtime and mitigating damages.

The IBM Guardium Vulnerability Assessment tool helps in identifying potential issues, such as missing updates, weak passwords and configuration errors. With a proactive approach to assessing your security posture, you can maintain a stronger defense against emerging cyber threats.

3. Improve productivity

Your data security and privacy rules should help improve your business, not hinder daily operations or progress. It’s important to consider how you can improve data security without negatively impacting productivity.

Here are some ideas:

• Encourage cross-functional collaboration between departments to build security measures into workflows
• Provide easy-to-use encryption tools like a password manager and a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to allow people to remotely access systems without compromising the company’s data security
• Use automated security tools such as a threat detection system to reduce the burden of manual intervention.

IBM Guardium solutions can help your cybersecurity teams monitor user activity and respond to threats in near real-time. The automated and centralized controls ensure teams waste less time looking into problems and can get the insights they need to make informed decisions.

A centralized approach secures your data

As the cloud matures and scales rapidly, we must realize that effective data security isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Security teams must embrace this ongoing process throughout the data lifecycle.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to data security, your organization can take control of these challenges by bringing all your data security and compliance tools together. This centralized approach improves visibility to give security teams control over their data across the enterprise and cloud.

Want to discover three more data security challenges and how to overcome them? Read the “Overcoming data security challenges in a hybrid multi-cloud world” ebook for a more in-depth view.