First Steps: 7 Initiatives to Ensure Customer Data Security

Information is the most valuable currency in the global market. The success of a business is intrinsically linked to the protection of this information and data, as well as the credibility of the company being directly related to how this data is handled and ensuring a secure environment for its clients.

Security and Privacy as Competitive Differentiators
It is important to emphasize that security has not been a luxury for large companies for quite some time. On the contrary, due to the boom of startups and small businesses that directly depend on technology, they have become attractive targets for cybercriminals. In Brazil, 57% of companies already invest in digital protection, and the trend is for security to increasingly grow as a competitive differentiator. On the other side, 96% of consumers worldwide claim they want more control over their data.

In August of this year, the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) had its sanctions widely enforced, with fines of up to 2% of gross revenue, potentially reaching R$ 50 million per infraction. If the financial penalties are not enough, there’s also the severe drop in the company’s credibility that comes from experiencing a data leak, a breach, or having its data seized, necessitating a multimillion-dollar ransom and resulting in service downtime.

Startups with Digital Products in the Cybersecurity Race
This is not pessimism; it’s business. In a startup environment, where digital products grow rapidly and operations expand from one week to the next, managers and technology executives take on a Herculean task: implementing cybersecurity processes. Some challenges include not hindering the company’s growth, choosing cost-effective solutions, working with limited hours and teams, and understanding the relevant threats and risks to the business.

To help outline priorities when creating your first security program, we have created a roadmap with the most important first steps:

Step 1 - Mapping
Data Mapping: Just as important as inventorying the company’s equipment, devices, and valuable assets, is mapping the information within your organization. Understanding how this data is collected, processed, stored, and even discarded is essential for creating a secure data lifecycle. If you don’t know where you are, you might also not know when (and how much) you will lose.

Asset Mapping: The assets that are part of the data lifecycle and keep your product and service available to customers must also be properly mapped. This helps understand the breadth of your system’s infrastructure, identifying its weak points for repairs.

Mapping Your Current Exposure Level: Knowing your company’s level of exposure helps raise awareness among the entire team about the necessity of protection. This can be easily done with the Free Score from Unxpose. The automated, non-intrusive test shows your company's cybersecurity score, how many vulnerabilities threaten your business, and whether your organization’s corporate credentials have been involved in recent leaks.

Step 2 - Security Policies and Culture
Policies: Have concise security policies that clarify processes and teach best practices, with clear rules and practical examples, if possible. A good policy should also consider the company’s privacy and access processes, delineating who should have access to what based on the criticality of the information.

Data Classification: In addition to the policy, it is necessary to classify the business data levels, from public information to restricted access, defining how this information should be treated according to its level.

Security Culture: As outlined by the concepts of Security & Privacy by Design, a security culture should exist from the company’s inception, being naturally implemented at the start of any process. This will prevent the costly rework of implementing security after processes are already in place, mitigating misconfigurations, avoiding the development of insecure applications, and anticipating risks and threats to the business from the outset.

Step 3 - Cloud Protection
Secure Scalability: Understanding what constitutes a critical vulnerability for your application and business is not a simple task. In a highly scalable infrastructure, which the product depends on, it is necessary to designate failures according to operations, allowing you to choose where to act, thus crafting a truly effective strategy.

Backup: A well-defined backup process can make the difference between quickly recovering your services or experiencing complete business shutdown in the event of any disaster. Whether facing a technical unexpected event, an error, or a criminal ransomware attack that seizes data for multimillion-dollar ransoms.

Step 4 - Building Your Team
Defining Roles: It is essential to design the company’s security processes while considering all weak points, from application development to the simplest daily operations. Therefore, bringing specialists into the task is essential, whether they are CISOs, managers, analysts, or security consultants.

In-house or Consulting: To hire or not to hire? Some companies may lack the structure for a security team and sometimes delegate the task to developers or even IT technicians. In addition to diluting the effectiveness of security processes among all other tasks of these professionals, no matter how technically proficient they are.

Hiring: Finding the ideal professional can be challenging. Security specialists still rank among the highest-paid in the technology field. To avoid a poor hire, the most common hiring method is through referrals from those already working in the field, streamlining the headhunting process. Other alternatives to a tech recruiter include seeking specialized consulting firms or sponsoring and participating in high-engagement events, such as Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions—like UHC. It can also be beneficial for the company to look for a junior or mid-level profile and train them internally.

Step 6: Covering All Bases

Red Team and Blue Team: Having Red Team professionals working as ethical hackers, hunting for and testing the company’s vulnerabilities, alongside Blue Team defense professionals who analyze and improve the infrastructure, is the recipe for an effective security program. The work of each of these teams is complementary, addressing all risk scenarios and their solutions simultaneously.

Awareness: It cannot be emphasized enough that security is a responsibility for all members of an organization, regardless of their position or skills. To reinforce the culture and the mentioned security processes, there must be a Security Awareness and Education program throughout the organization, in addition to initiatives such as Security Champions. It is advisable for the subject to be approached in a fun, light, and practical manner, communicating with those unfamiliar with technical jargon and rewarding good practices.

Step 7: Automate and Choose Effective Solutions

To conclude with a flourish, we arrive at the favored step of every manager: automation. Security tools and solutions can simplify the executive's work and save hours spent on tedious and inefficient tasks. Therefore, Unxpose comes highly recommended, offering data mapping with digital asset mapping intersection—since part of these assets hosts sensitive business information. Unxpose's intelligent automation is designed as a one-stop solution, allowing the tool to serve as the first collaborator of the security team or even as an additional arm for a lean team.

Unxpose is a one-stop shop for cybersecurity that operates from the discovery of exposed digital assets to the correction of security flaws-all in an automated, simple, and educational manner 24/7. Unxpose combines the expertise of professionals who are market leaders in cybersecurity with the competence of product development specialists, delivering a solution that marries technical effectiveness with high value delivery.