Data Security strategy for organizations

Discover how global, local, and industry regulations shape data security, from WIPO global patent and trademark registrations to GDPR, CCPA, PCI-DSS, and SOX compliance for public companies and healthcare sectors.

Explore PCI DSS and its 12 requirements for securing cardholder data, including firewall protection, encryption of transmissions, access controls, and ongoing security testing.

Explore HIPAA's security framework for protecting patient data, covering general security principles, risk management, and administrative, physical, technical, and organizational safeguards, plus third-party contracts and policies.

Understand GDPR's core requirements: lawful, fair, and transparent processing; purpose limitation; data subject rights; consent; breach notification; privacy by design and data transfers.

Explore the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's governance, accounting, and reporting standards for public companies, and its essential security requirements like access control and change management.

Learn ISO 27001's information security management system and its 14 domains with Annex A controls. Explore policy, risk management, asset protection, cryptography, and incident and business continuity management.

Understand how local legislation affects data security, documenting country-specific rules and ensuring compliance with laws like France health data hosting, UK NHS, and Japan privacy law.

Define security governance and explain how it coordinates security activities, enables information flow, and supports risk management across the organization, emphasizing shared responsibility and accountable participation by all employees.

Explore the four components of security governance—security policy framework and policies and standards, risk management, security awareness, and metrics for improvements—and how they define ownership and roles across the organization.

Explore the security policy framework, detailing policy, standards, procedures, guidelines, and baselines, distinguish mandatory from discretionary elements, and outline information security policy sections such as purpose, scope, roles, and training.

Define and implement data protection roles across senior management, the CISO and security team, data owners, data custodians, data users, and auditors to enforce security controls throughout the data lifecycle.

Security risk management forms the foundation of an information security program, identifying risks by evaluating threats and vulnerabilities and using likelihood and impact to determine risk scores for assets.

Examine how threats and vulnerabilities create risk, with examples like floods, cyber crimes, and lack of backup power. Identify threat actors—from hackers to insiders and developers—and how they exploit weaknesses.

Learn how to define valid risk by mapping assets to threats and vulnerabilities, evaluate asset value (tangible or data-based intangible), and calculate risk severity and impact on operations and stakeholders.

Learn how risk management frameworks like coso, iso 27005, and nisT sp 800-30 guide identifying, assessing, mitigating, and monitoring organizational risks in an ongoing cycle.

Identify risks by mapping assets, prioritizing crown jewels, and documenting threats and vulnerabilities. Cyber criminals may exploit an SQL injection vulnerability in an e-commerce app to access customer data.

Compare qualitative and quantitative risk assessments, scoring likelihood and impact to determine overall risk, and quantify losses using asset value, exposure factor, single loss expectancy, and annualized loss expectancy.

Explore risk response strategies: acceptance, mitigation, transference, and avoidance. Learn to apply countermeasures—physical, technical, and administrative—and evaluate ROI and TCO.

Monitor and report risk using key risk indicators and key performance indicators to provide early warning of risk exposure and measure whether security controls effectively minimize risk.

Assess third party risks through security due diligence, including SLAs, NDAs, and MSAs, to ensure compliant and secure services. Maintain vigilance with incident response, cyber insurance, and annual security assessments.

Explore security awareness training, learning management systems, clear policies and standards, and phishing tests to educate employees and strengthen data security across the organization.

Assess security metrics and improvements to ensure controls are functional and effective, while monitoring risks, identifying threats and vulnerabilities, and maintaining asset inventory, classification, and user awareness.

Explore data monitoring controls and the incident response process to gain visibility on our data and learn how to respond to data security incidents, including a data breach.

Identify and continuously monitor all IT assets in real-time, tangible and intangible, through asset discovery, classification, and ownership to apply appropriate security controls and protect data.

Identify and manage organizational assets with owner details and business impact to strengthen data security and incident response, using asset discovery, software licenses, and CMDB relationships.

Explore structured vs unstructured data access and monitoring, emphasizing controls, encryption, logging, and labeling. Apply data loss prevention and file integrity monitoring to detect violations and ransomware across data types.

Explore database access monitoring and file access monitoring solutions for structured and unstructured data to detect anomalies, report violations, and remediate unauthorized access for auditing and protection.

Explore file access monitoring with ManageEngine Data Security Plus, including file audit, file analysis, risk analysis, DLP, cloud protection, and alert-driven insights from a Windows file server.

Define incident response processes for data breaches, practice planning to notify authorities, and distinguish incidents from events within internal and external obligations.

Define an incident response process with a multi-role team including incident handler, scribe, security analysts, and data owner, covering preparation, identification, containment, remediation, recovery, lessons learned, and communication.

Prepare for security incidents by securing executive support, asset and data awareness, and administrative, physical, and technical controls; document incident response processes, define roles, and rehearse through tabletop exercises.

Identify and validate security incidents in the identification phase by verifying events against a network baseline, reviewing anti-malware, IPS, and logs for suspicious events, and declaring incidents for formal response.

Containment phase prevents and limits damage by isolating affected assets, disrupting propagation, and applying immediate controls such as disconnecting systems, disabling accounts, and restricting network traffic.

Remediation reverses incident effects and removes attack vectors with a well-documented, environment-specific process. It cleans up suspicious processes, altered files, and registry keys across Windows, Unix, and cloud storage.

Lead the recovery phase by restoring from clean backups, validating no malware remains, applying patches, and implementing disaster recovery, logging, monitoring, and out-of-band communication for secure resumption.

Learn from the incident by identifying root causes and weaknesses, documenting lessons learned, and producing an incident report with executive summary, timeline, analysis, observations, and recommendations.

Simulate cyber threat scenarios with tabletop exercises to test and improve the incident response plan. Reveal gaps in documentation, tools, controls, and team responsibilities through regular practice.

Implement a data breach notification process that identifies scope, informs regulators and affected individuals within 72 hours under GDPR, and documents forensic findings and containment plans.

Explore data security with a focus on technical controls, and review tools and solutions that strengthen data protection, building on prior operational and administrative controls.

Explore centralized and decentralized access controls, compare governance and visibility, and learn how role-based and policy-based and attribute-based access controls safeguard data in organizations.

Defense in depth uses a layered approach to protect data and assets. Focus on data security governance, incident response, and policy-driven operations across applications, endpoints, networks, and perimeter controls.

Explore data security technical controls that safeguard confidentiality, integrity, and availability through data access controls, encryption in motion and at rest, data loss prevention, data classification, and data integrity monitoring.

Define and enforce identity and access management to provide the right level of access for data, applying privileged access management and precise permissions for structured and unstructured data.

Master data encryption strategies, including encryption at rest and in motion, with examples like database, file, and storage encryption. Learn how PKI and digital certificates secure data movement and integrity.

Implement data loss prevention across endpoints, networks, and cloud to detect and prevent data breaches, enforce policies, and classify data to minimize breach risks.

Learn how to implement data loss prevention within Office 365 by creating GDPR-focused DLP policies, applying them across emails, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, and configuring actions, thresholds, and protections.

Data classification tools tag and classify data to apply layer-specific security controls, labels, and encryption, integrating with DLP, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Solutions.

Explore how the Office 365 data classification portal uses prebuilt labels and templates, plus Content Explorer, to automatically classify, label, and encrypt data while enabling DLP controls.

Explore file integrity monitoring (fim) to detect changes in unstructured data, establish baselines with file hashes, and enable policy-driven incident response and threshold alerts.

Log and monitor data access, changes, and movements to identify violations and trigger alerts for incident response, with centralized security logs in a stream-based event monitoring solution.

Explore data discovery and protection solutions, such as Varonis, that integrate with on-prem and cloud resources to identify data, classify content, and enforce automated security controls.

Celebrate completing the course and recognize its usefulness for your data security journey while exploring identity and access management and privileged access management, and rate it on Udemy if helpful.

Set up a virtual lab with a Windows 11 client and a Windows Server 2019 domain controller and file server, install domain services, and test auditing with ManageEngine ADAudit Plus.

Explore a ready-made lab environment on Azure featuring a Windows 11 workstation, Hyper-V, and a Windows Server 2019 with Active Directory for a practical data security setup.

Configure Windows Server 2019 as a file server for data security by creating an Active Directory structure, three users and folders, and granting read-write access for sharing, with future testing.

Configure and test a Windows file server with Active Directory users, map network drives, and access folders by credentials, then prep monitoring and auditing with a ManageEngine solution.

Install and configure ADAudit Plus on a Windows Server 2019 domain controller to monitor file access and permissions across servers and workstations using the default port 8081.

Configure manageengine ad audit plus on windows file server by logging in, joining domains, setting alerts and mail, enabling sso and two-factor authentication, and enabling siem and branding.

Connect to Audit Plus remotely from Windows 11, configure firewall port 8081 for remote access, and explore identity governance through user logon reports, authentication auditing, and file access monitoring.

Track Active Directory user and group changes with Audit Plus, review accounts, groups, and authentication events through dashboards and reports for proactive security monitoring.

Shows how Manageengine AD Audit Plus tracks identity and access events in Active Directory, including OU monitoring and GPO changes. Demonstrates creating an OU and reviewing GPO changes for governance.

Learn to troubleshoot ManageEngine Audit Plus by verifying credentials, domain settings, and auditing policies, and consult the troubleshooting page to ensure complete AD and Azure AD reporting.

Integrate ADAudit Plus with Windows file servers to monitor and audit file activity, including create, modify, delete, and rename events, with real-time or scheduled share-based reports.

Explore file integrity monitoring, analytics, and alerts with ADAudit Plus to detect file changes and unusual login failures on domain controllers and file shares.