Assessment 2: ABC Company

Activity 1

Explain the advantages of encrypting the data

Data encryption refers to the process of converting the data into the form which is not understandable by humans and can only be read using the decryption key or password. This process has many advantages according to ClearCrypt (n.d) and Matthews (2019) such as:

• Maintains integrity which is to maintain accuracy, completeness, and data security by avoiding hackers to steal and commit fraud to the information. If by chance they access it so it is immediately reported cyber-attack.
• Security of data at all times is maintained such as while at transaction or stored at a specific device.
• Privacy is protected such as the client’s sensitive information which is crucial to avoid misuse of information by surveillance.
• Supported by multiple platforms or devices such as laptops, desktop, smartphones, and even IoT (Internet of thing).
• The necessity to run a successful business such as with encryption clients can trust to give their personal information.
• Part of law regulation to avoid fines such as misuse of a customer or employee information may cause a company to pay a hectic fine.
• Remote work is also secured as when business runners are working remotely that’s when the data is most vulnerable as stated by 86% of C-Suite executives and 60% of SME’s owners.

Number of storage system needs to be encrypted

ABC company has database, web, and email servers and multiple storage devices so encryption is needed in all of the mentioned systems they use. Database servers hold sensitive data such as employees, clients, and other business entities information that needs to be encrypted by using a key to avoid security breaches. According to Loshin (2019), securing web content has also now become a virtual necessity to show authenticity and also to maintain data integrity between servers and browsers. Hence having an SSL certificate and securing HTTP over Transport layer security is a proper encrypting strategy for the webserver.

Email server encryption requires a certificate. You leave yourself vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack without a certificate, whereby malicious parties may insert themselves between you and your mail server to intercept and manipulate your emails. It will certainly not be a successful situation and it is clear that it is important to use a certificate on your mail server (Olenski, 2016).

Store encryption requires encrypting data before transferring to storage machines, such as actual hard disk drives, tape drives, or the libraries and collections containing them to avoid falling it into the wrong hands.

Data-at-rest and Data-at-motion strategy

Data-at-motion refers to the data that is currently in transit either from one network to another network or from a local storage device to the cloud (uploading data). This is the stage where data is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. While data-at-rest refers to the data stored at local devices such as hard drives, laptops, etc. at times these data are usually of value to the individual or company (Lord, 2019). 

According to Lord (2019), both data-at-motion and data-at-rest should be protected for a modern enterprise because nowadays hackers found innovative ways to get access to data. For data-at-motion strategies such as encrypted protocols like SSL, TLS, etc. should be used and for data-at-rest encryption key should be applied before storing it to devices.