Data Protection and Security

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Week Four – Data Protection and Security

Marlon R. Evans

DBM/502

4/10/17

Mark Paxton

Data Protection and Security

Due to the sensitive nature of Estation’s organizational information, it is of the utmost importance to ensure that all data contained within the new database is not only secure, but accessible at all times, with minimal outages from power glitches, surges, and/or natural disasters.

In our efforts to keep the organization’s data safeguarded from malicious attacks and theft from both internal and external parties, we must look at various methods that could be utilized to achieve our desired security level. The first security measure that we will use to secure our database will come courtesy of the encryption provided by an SSL certificate. The usage of an SSL certificate will ensure that all data is encrypted during transmissions, and will be safe from data interception.

When addressing internal and external attacks, the organization will have all desktop peripherals disabled to ensure that internal employees cannot use device such as thumb drives to steal sensitive information. For external threats, we will utilize De-militarized Zones (DMZ), as this is one of the safest ways to minimize external attacks. According to Margaret Rouse’s article on DMZs, “In computer networks, a DMZ (demilitarized zone) is a physical or logical sub-network that separates an internal local area network (LAN) from other untrusted networks, usually the Internet. External-facing servers, resources and services are located in the DMZ so they are accessible from the Internet but the rest of the internalLANremains unreachable. This provides an additional layer of security to the LAN as it restricts the ability of hackers to directly access internal servers and data via the Internet.” (Rouse, 2017).

As it relates to protection from outages and natural disasters, the organization must have a continuity plan in place that will act as a precautionary measure against any unforeseen occurrences. Because of the potential for outages to occur, we must be diligent in our efforts to minimize downtime as much as possible. To help offset this, we will have redundancy in place, with the organization’s data held both on-site, as well as on an off-site server.

When speaking of speed and efficiency when the data is being accessed at its peak time, the data will be accessed by the remote server courtesy of Software as a Service (SaaS), due to the faster servers, and guaranteed availability. During off-peak hours, we will utilize the on-site database server, as the need for access to the data will be reduced during this time.

In conclusion, with the suggested solutions in place, our organization will be more than equipped to appropriately handle speed, efficiency, as well as scalability in the near and immediate future.

References

Rouse, M.(2017).DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).Retrieved from http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/DMZ