Keep your data safe and secure

Are you PoPI Act compliant?

Protect Data on the move.

• Securing data on the move is a prime concern for many businesses.
• What if an employee takes customer data home to work on?
• Small storage devices like USB drives or HDDs can easily be lost or stolen. Globally more than 2 million are lost each year and studies have shown that over half of dropped USB sticks get plugged in.
• This leaves your organisation at risk of non-compliance with PoPI.
• One easy step to reduce this risk is to use encrypted devices. Encrypting involves scrambling the data in such a way that only someone with the correct code or key can read it.

Did you know? 9,740,567,988 Data records have been lost or stolen since 2013.

• In just 4% of these cases the stolen data was encrypted rendering it useless to the thieves.
• In 2006, one in Five organisations suffered a mobile security breach.
• Primarily driven by malware and malicious WiFi.

Organisations and individuals need to do more to protect their own and their customers’ personal data from theft. This can be done by raising greater awareness of the potential risks that we are exposed to. Ensuring that everyone knows the importance of backing up your data as part of your daily routine. And to use products and services to help keep your data safe and secure.

What is the PoPI (Protection of Personal Information) Act?

In simple terms, the purpose of the PoPI Act is to ensure that all South African institutions conduct themselves in a responsible manner. When collecting, processing, storing and sharing another entity’s personal information by holding them accountable. Should they abuse or compromise your personal information in any way. The PoPI legislation basically considers your personal information to be “precious goods”. And therefore aims to bestow upon you, as the owner of your personal information, certain rights of protection and the ability to exercise control over it.

What is AES 256-BIT Encryption?

• AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard. It is a symmetric block cypher that is adopted throughout the world to encrypt sensitive data.
• 256-bit refers to the length of the encryption key used too encrypt a data stream or file. A hacker or cracker will require 2256 * different combinations to break a 256-bit encrypted message. Which amounts to more than the number of atoms in the entire universe!
• AES has never been cracked and is safe against brute force attacks.

‘Hardware’ vs ‘Software’ based encryption.

Hardware-based encryption:

• Hardware encryption uses a dedicated encrypted drive processor physically located on the drive.
• Does not require additional software, so free from malware infection.
• Increased performance by off-loading encryption from the host system attacks, such as cold boot attacks.
• Protects against the most common malicious code and brute force attacks.
• Requires minimum configuration.

Software-based encryption:

• Available for all major operating systems and devices.
• Cost effective.
• Easy to use, upgrade and update.
• Only as safe as your computer level of protection can be compromised if operating system has low levels of security.
• Complicated to configure for advanced use.
• Susceptible to brute force attacks. Hackers can access the computer’s memory and reset the attempt counter.

Backing up Archiving.

Regular back-ups protect against both accidental or malicious data loss. This can be anything from hardware faults and viruses to human error or theft – as they can be used to restore original data files.

Choosing the right media & back-up procedure depends on:

• The amount of data being saved.
• The perceived value of the data.
• The levels of accepted risk.
• The length of time you need to keep the data for.

Best practice – Apply the 3-2-1 back up rule:

3 – Have at least 3 copies of your data.

In addition to your primary information, you should also have at least 2 more backups. This will help significantly reduce the risk of losing everything. These could be physical and / or cloud solutions.

2 – Store the copies on at least 2 different media.

It is best practice to keep copies of your information on at least 2 different storage types. Such as internal hard disk drives AND removable storage media (tapes, external hard drives, USB drives, SD-cards, CD’s, DVD’s.)

1 – Keep at least 1 offsite backup copy.

It’s obvious really. But it’s not a good idea to keep your external storage device in the same room as your production storage. If there is a fire, flood or burglary – you would lose all of your information.

CJN IT Solutions provides a complete IT solution:

• IT maintenance.
• IT support.
• Network design and implementation.
• Backup solutions.
• Microsoft 365.
• Cloud Computing.
• Disaster recovery.
• Data Recovery.
• Software and Hardware services solutions: repairs, upgrades and sales.
• Internet.
• Removal of viruses and spyware.

Contact us for more information at 087 809 3516 or complete the form below.

We spesilise in IT support and Software support services.