This article was written by Top Ten Reviews
The news can’t focus on every data breach anymore, because there are so many of them. Scores of data breaches happen every year. The current focus is on health systems because they provide such a wealth of information; but any company, which collects customer data, is vulnerable. Data breaches don’t just put companies at risk. Consumers, whose personal information is on the line, are affected significantly. The threat of identity theft looms closer with every instance of breached security.
2014’s Most Serious Data Breaches
The biggest data breaches of 2014 tell a frightening story (see the infographic below). E-Bay, Chase, the Home Depot, Community Health Systems, and Michaels suffered the most devastating breaches, but they certainly weren’t the only companies to have secure data stolen. E-Bay lost 145 million people’s information. On top of the 76 million people affected by the Chase breach, seven million small businesses also had information stolen.
What’s worse is the time it takes these companies to figure out something’s wrong. The fastest response time was three months, as this infographic shows. It took Michaels, a popular craft store chain, 11 months to discover their data breach. That is a significant amount of lost time.
Community Health Systems reported that their breach may have cost the company as much as 150 million dollars. The average cost of a data breach in 2014 was 3.5 million, and that number gets bigger every month. But with employees unwisely clicking suspicious attachments and 68 percent of companies in a recent survey failing to use any sort of email encryption, the problem seems almost insurmountable.
So what can be done about it?
Data-Centric Security
Crypteron offers a security platform, which focuses on securing the data itself. Instead of adding external encryption programs and security options to exiting cloud and storage platforms, the Crypteron solution builds the security directly into the data storage apps.
The way they provide data-centric security is by reducing the “circle of trust.” The number of people, servers, and devices that traditionally have access to sensitive data is large. The larger that circle is, the more unwieldy and difficult security becomes. Crypteron’s app is the only thing authorized to access the sensitive data, which eliminates all those other vulnerable points from the equation. (But not even Crypteron themselves can read your sensitive data; only the customer holds both the encryption keys and the data.)
Better Encryption, Easier Use
Crypteron’s solution is simpler than many other security solutions. Instead of adding hardware, changing infrastructure, or a large number of data access points, Crypteron’s focus is the developer. Simply put, a company’s data storage in the public cloud is encrypted via Crypteron’s military grade encryption app options. Since only the app itself is trusted with the data encryption, the vulnerable points often exploited by hackers are shut down. By studying past data breaches, Crypteron developers have crafted a system that requires few changes.
Data breaches are serious; companies require more and more information from consumers to perform the simplest transactions. Consumers need to trust that the data they provide is safe from breaches and won’t turn into a bad case of identity theft months or years down the road.
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