Each year on January 28, the United States, Canada, Israel and 47 European countries observe Data Privacy Day. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to inspire dialogue on the importance of online privacy. These discussions also seek to inspire individuals and businesses to take action in an effort to respect privacy, safeguard data and enable trust. In observance of Data Privacy Day this year, here are five recommendations through which organizations can bolster their data security efforts.

Today’s network and data security environments are complex and diverse. There are hundreds of pieces to a security system and all of those pieces need to be looked at individually and as a whole to make sure they are not only working properly for your organization, but also safe and not posing a security threat to your company and your data or the data of your customers.

In my line of work, it is often a requirement to provide our customers with background information on the employees who will be performing on-site professional services. This is not in itself an issue, but how the customer receives and handles that information can be. Tripwire best practice is for HR to provide an attestation of all requested background checks to our clients rather than providing detailed background reports or having the client run a background check on our employees.

Security, privacy, and risk does not have to be scary… but with GDPR, CCPA, and organizations moving to a risk-based approach to security rather than focusing on only compliance, it has become a daunting challenge. What is typically at the heart of organizations? Data and information. The common denominator that makes security, privacy and risk more effective and dare I say, easier?….data governance.

As a society we have always relied on personal identifiers, commonly known as personally identifiable information (PII). Defining and protecting PII has recently become much more important as a component of personal privacy now that advances in computing and communications technology, including the internet, has made it easier to collect and process vast amounts of information.