How to minimise a data breach’s impact via next-generation data lifecycle management

The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) Essential Directors update in 2023 emphasised the significance of enhancing a company's cyber security resilience, citing “if you don't need the sensitive, confidential information you're holding, dispose of it.”

Beyond disposal, your organisation can better mitigate against a cyber attack by classifying, digitising and securely storing your data. From then you can also benefit from automating workflows, and unlocking valuable insights from your sensitive data — via next-generation data lifecycle management.

Understanding data breaches

The AICD Essential Directors update also presented three questions for company directors to consider:

1. What sensitive or personal data do we possess that cyber criminals may target?
2. Why are we holding this data?
3. Is the data coded or encrypted, or embedded with other data loss prevention safeguards?

Regarding question one, organisations are subject to a growing number of cyber attacks, with the global cost of cybercrime estimated to reach USD 10.5 trillion by 2025. Australian organisations, in particular, are feeling its effect, with the average cost of a data breach reaching $2 million.

What is at the core of these attacks, exactly? Malicious actors target data — of large and small corporations alike — to exploit sensitive and/or personal information for identity theft, financial gain, and access to organisational secrets, critical infrastructure, and national security details.

They do so via various methods, including:

• Phishing attacks, where fraudulent communications trick individuals into revealing sensitive information.
• Malware, which infects systems to steal data or disrupt operations.
• Ransomware, where attackers encrypt data and demand a ransom for its release.
• Exploiting vulnerabilities in software and systems to gain unauthorised access.

These methods enable cybercriminals to gain unauthorised access and infiltrate networks, extract valuable information, and potentially cripple organisational functions.

It’s because of these risks that all confidential or risk-carrying information within your organisation needs to be accounted for — bringing question two into the foreground: for what reason are you holding certain data? Moreover, mitigating cyber risks demands an account of how data within your organisation is being managed across its lifecycle.

Failing to properly manage your data’s lifecycle can result in damages on multiple fronts: reputational, operational, financial, and more. On the regulatory front, penalties in Australia for serious and repeated breaches of the Privacy Act 1988 potentially reach up to $50 million. Similarly, failing to comply with global data protection regulations, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can result in fines of up to €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher.

Fortunately, by optimising your data’s lifecycle, you can work to minimise the impact of data breaches before they actualise.

How to minimise the impact of a data breach: key strategies for data lifecycle optimisation

To avoid becoming tomorrow's news and safeguard both customers and the company from reputational and financial harm, organisations must shift away from the 'keep everything' mindset — minimising the attack surface on which a security breach can occur. They can do this by implementing Iron Mountain’s information transformation process: classifying, organising, securing, digitising, and unlocking value from their data and information.

To usher in information transformation and optimise your data’s lifecycle in doing so, your organisation can follow these five steps.

Step 1: Identify

Determine what should be digitised, stored, or defensibly destroyed — you can’t make good business decisions if you don’t know what you have in your data and information inventory. Once you know what data and information you have, you need to understand your information governance regulation requirements and develop an information governance program and retention schedule to effectively manage your data and reduce risk.

Step 2: Digitise

Go paper-free or paper-light. Paper documents that are pertinent for business operations should be converted into digital format so they’re easier to access and analyse. However, not everything needs to be digitised.

Our study found that around 60% of documents are redundant, obsolete, or trivial. To determine what to digitise, you need to understand your compliance requirements, the potential monetisation value of the data, whether you need to access it for business and/or audit needs, the cost of digitisation and storage, and the impact on existing processes, SLAs, and people.

Step 3: Store

Securely access scanned or digitally born information from a future-ready repository. With a secure cloud storage repository, you can ingest documents from various locations, such as other cloud repositories, enterprise content management systems (ECMs), and file shares. By centralising your scanned and digitally born documents, you gain enhanced visibility, better connections, and improved access.

Step 4: Automate

Enable collaboration and workflow automation for document-centric processes. Once your data and information have been sorted, you should look to automate manual processes where possible. A combination of digitisation and modern technology that integrates with your existing systems can help eliminate bottlenecks and free up your employees to focus on more high-value tasks.

Step 5: Unlock

View and integrate key data to identify patterns and trends. Your final step is understanding your data and drawing insights. By aggregating and visually connecting your data through dashboards on one platform, you’ll gain powerful insights to make more informed business decisions. It also has the potential to uncover new revenue streams you may not have considered before.

Additional key strategies and considerations for data lifecycle management

To successfully transform your organisation’s information, sponsorship needs to come from the top. Your leadership team must demonstrate how the organisation will benefit from the change, determining the key objectives and success metrics.

However, managing the lifecycle of data — both physical and digital — isn’t the job of one department/group alone. You need to create a cyber-aware culture that encourages and empowers all staff across the organisation to be accountable and responsible for protecting data and information. This collective responsibility helps build a robust defence against potential data security breaches.

In parallel, developing an information governance framework allows you to define how your organisation creates, uses, shares, stores, archives, values, and deletes physical and digital information. Introducing a well-defined retention schedule helps identify how long important data and information needs to be retained before it can be destroyed.

The Iron Mountain solution

At Iron Mountain, we employ a three-stage maturity model. This model helps organisations establish a solid foundation for data management, streamline processes through automation, and unlock valuable insights for strategic decision-making. As a data breach prevention strategy, this three-stage model provides a comprehensive framework to secure, manage, and optimise your data assets throughout their lifecycle.

Here's how Iron Mountain can help.

Stage One: Business-critical information management

Stage one focuses on establishing the foundations for change, including reducing storage costs, securing assets, and ensuring compliance and risk management. It involves:

• Assessing how and where information is stored.
• Determining the necessity of retained information and considering digitisation.
• Evaluating compliance with regulatory obligations.
• Ensuring the cyber security of sensitive files, preventing unauthorised access.
• Managing the transition, storage, and disposal of outdated IT assets and files.

The gathered intelligence will guide the transfer of data into a centralised and organised management framework.

Key benefits of this stage include creating an accessible and useful information management framework, setting parameters for automation to enhance compliance and risk management, and increasing customer satisfaction by ensuring secure storage of sensitive information. This stage also aids in managing physical storage and real estate costs, and establishing robust information and data management practices for dispersed teams.

Stage Two: Business information optimisation

Stage two focuses on optimising centralised data through automation and enhanced accessibility. Automation streamlines workflows, reducing human error and ensuring compliance with data management regulations — including regulatory reporting and the mandatory deletion of expired assets.

A centralised framework allows employees to access and collaborate on information from any location, enhancing productivity and efficiency. Moreover, this framework supports seamless integration with various business applications and tools, enabling a cohesive digital ecosystem. Enhanced accessibility ensures that team members can retrieve up-to-date information swiftly, facilitating quicker decision-making processes. Additionally, the centralisation of data minimises redundancy and inconsistencies, providing a single source of truth for the entire organisation.

Stage Three: Business information transformation

In stage three, we leverage Iron Mountain InSight our Digital Experience Platform (DxP) with intelligent document processing and content management to transform business information into a valuable resource. This platform integrates physical and digital information, extracts relevant details, and streamlines document-related tasks.

Building on the foundations of stages one and two, the improved information management framework supports your company’s digital-first strategy, facilitating enhanced protection against data loss and ensuring robust data security measures are in place.

With Iron Mountain, you can act now and put the right measures in place to minimise the impact of data breaches before they happen by confidently securing, managing, and unlocking the full potential of your data assets. This, in turn, ensures that the information you carry is safeguarded from cyber threats with the necessary data breach prevention and incident response measures. It’s no longer a matter of ‘if’ a data breach will occur but ‘when’.

For more information and to hear from award-winning cyber resilience specialist Simone Herbert-Lowe, Director of Law & Cyber watch our webinar ‘Prevention is better than cure: Why an information transformation is your best defence against a data breach’

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