A data breach is more than just a technical issue. Once a company faces a data breach, various departments, including legal, financial, public relations, and other operations-related teams, become answerable. Rectifying the issue may become difficult without a cohesive response from all involved departments and a leadership figure.
The critical question that then stands is who should lead the process after a data breach?
Usually, it is the Chief Technology Officer who takes precedence. However, this position may not exist in most small and medium-sized organizations. In such cases, someone within the executive team, senior IT members, or even the public relations department must assume the role.
Which departments are responsible after the data breach?
Who should take accountability for company data breach becomes an unresolved topic of the endless team meetings?
Regardless of who bears the ultimate responsibility, companies must provide comprehensive support from all departments involved. To resolve a data breach with a cohesive response, the following departments can offer help.
1. The IT team
When a company faces a data breach, it must immediately identify and secure any security gaps that can implicate them more. Often companies are so overwhelmed by the sudden data breach that they forget to close any possible security gaps that could worsen the issue.
An Experian survey revealed that over 55% of IT security executives did not know how the end-users in their organizations could gain access to classified and sensitive data. So, before understanding how to protect their networks from future attacks, IT security executives must gather all the critical information on how the data breach occurred. Without this vital data, it can be challenging to create responsive strategies for IT security for future infringement.
An immediate assessment of a data breach also offers support and direction to the individual assuming the leadership role and clarifies public statements and customer response. Without this, their ability to provide transparency to employees, third-party vendors, legal agencies, and processes involved in the data breach can face severe consequences in the aftermath of data infringement.
2. PR and communications
To maintain its brand value, reputation, and customer loyalty, a company must carefully curate a public response to affected consumers, media, shareholders, vendors, regulators, suppliers, and internal staff. Accordingly to a popular survey, over 60% of respondents said that public relations need to be a critical department in the risk assessment to offer damage control on the public front.
3. Legal departments and compliance
When Home Depot suffered a data breach, it faced more than 40 civil lawsuits from its partners and consumers. When facing a data breach, it is imperative to work with legal departments to understand and decide the liabilities you may face and the actions you need to take to avoid further damage.
The discoveries made can help factor in breaking the news to the media and the communications to share with your consumers.
4. Government agencies and Law Enforcement
With the rise of data privacy, law enforcement agencies are now taking more active steps in case of data breaches. Working with government departments and law enforcement can help your organization detect how your network was compromised, recognize the perpetrators behind the attack and prevent further damage.
The best way to avoid your compromised information from being used fraudulently is to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in finding and arresting the data thief.
5. Insurance
The growing number of cyber insurance agencies reflects the growth in the adoption rate for cyber insurance policies, making them a critical component of a company’s response plan in the event of a data breach. Although only 30% of organizations purchased cyber insurance policies, the adoption rate has more than doubled in the last two years.
With data breaches becoming commonplace, more and more companies will be looking into insurance to protect their finances. In the event of a data breach discovery, you may want to contact your insurer immediately. It can help to know if you can recover losses or obtain compensation from third-party service providers from your insurer.
Best ways to solve a data breach?
Despite the growing security risks from cybercriminals, 20% of them still do not have a contingency plan or a dedicated individual responsible for managing their data breach response. One of the best ways to prevent data breaches is investing in data security tools like the Document DRM data security tool.
What is Document DRM?
As part of your data breach strategy, you may want to consider investing in digital rights management (DRM) as a data security tool. DRM works as a proactive method in preventing data breaches from taking place, enabling you to restrict access to classified, confidential, and sensitive documents and control how authorized users can use them.
How can Document DRM prevent data Breach?
Document DRM also enables you to track how documents are being used and revoke access in real-time if you have concerns over misuse. You can automatically expire access to ensure that users cannot view documents beyond a specific date or time frame. Companies can also use Document DRM to:
Prevents copying content from documents and pasting it into other applications
Block printing
Stop editing and modification
Stop sharing with unauthorized users
Stop forwarding unprotected files
If you are serious about stopping data breaches, you must consider document DRM as part of your overall data security strategy. Similarly, establishing a leadership role in this area can be crucial in containing the aftermath of data infringement. Hence, with the cooperation of various departments and data security tools like document DRM, the IT security head can organize organizational efforts to improve how quickly the company responds, how well it recovers, and how its consumers and the public views the company post the incident.
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