Harnessing AI For Advanced Data Protection At Work

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During the first quarter of 2023, over 6 million data records were breached. Data breaches can devastate a business’s reputation and finances, so data protection is a top priority.

Data protection requires a holistic approach that considers physical and digital security - both of which can be enhanced with AI technologies. Why is data protection important, and how can AI help you improve data security for your business?

Why Is Data Protection Your Top Priority?

A data breach has severe consequences for your business health that might take years to recover. Here’s what you can expect following a data breach:

  • Legal action - if you break GDPR compliance, you’ll be held liable, facing legal ramifications that will cost you legal fees. There’s no saying how long the court proceedings will last and how high your legal bill will be once you conclude.
  • Loss of trust - your stakeholders, clients, and customers trust you with their sensitive data and digital assets. Breaking this trust will have consequences, and you’ll likely lose business following a data breach.
  • Data recovery - If you lose your data, you’ll need to spend money recovering it, ensuring your business operations can continue.

Restoring your business health after a breach will take a long time, so your focus should be on prevention. In the rest of this post, we’ll explore some of the top ways to protect your company from data breaches.

Top AI Solutions For Data Protection

Let’s discuss how AI can help you create an air-tight data protection strategy.

1. Homomorphic Encryption

When you encrypt your data, you want it to stay encrypted to reduce the likelihood of a breach. Homomorphic encryption is a data protection technique that allows AI to use your encrypted data without decrypting it.  You can make changes and perform operations on the data while ensuring it’s never decrypted and thus vulnerable to interception. Data processing is a critical point in your operations where your data is vulnerable, and using homomorphic encryption is the best way to eliminate this risk.

2. Differential Privacy

Differential privacy is used in AI, protecting sensitive information by inserting controlled noise to reduce the potential for data leaks. With this noise in place, it would be extremely challenging to determine whether any specific data point is present in a data set.

3. Federated Learning

When training machine learning models, you can use federated learning to enable multiple parties to collaborate on training - without sharing their raw data. Each collaborator only uses their local data, sharing updates and gradients to ensure the data remains on their device while minimizing privacy risks.

4. AI Password Security

AI password managers are making it easier for companies to protect their passwords. AI presents a significant password-protected risk, so many companies are switching to biometrics for their data privacy strategies. However, using biometrics can incur hefty costs, as you must invest in devices with cameras, scanners, and other biometric readers.

AI password managers help to protect your passwords from AI. They scan your passwords to identify weak or easily guessed passwords. And they provide monitoring, sending you an alert if one of your passwords has become compromised. This is the best solution for maintaining company-wide password health without leaving anything to chance.

Physical Security For Data Security

Your building is home to many digital assets that could easily be intercepted in a physical security breach. Here are the top AI solutions for keeping your data secure:

1. Automated Threat Detection For Security Cameras

Your security cameras typically serve to document and deter crime. Visible camera placement shows potential intruders they’re being recorded. And, if there is a crime on your property, your security cameras can help you investigate the issue, determine the origin of the breach, and take steps to resolve it.  

With cloud-based security cameras, you gain open API integrations to integrate automated threat detection software. The AI solution uses behavior and object recognition to trigger alerts when suspicious activity is detected.   This way, you won’t need to consistently monitor your video feeds to identify a potential security threat (which is virtually impossible, regardless). Increasing the likelihood of spotting security threats in real-time will help you secure your building and, thus, your sensitive data and digital assets.

2. Access Control Readers With Identity Verification

Cloud-based card readers for doors are becoming increasingly popular in the modern security climate. It allows your security staff to review access logs from anywhere and enables you to use mobile access credentials instead of keycards, fobs, and pin pads.  

Cloud-based access control readers also enable open API integrations, allowing you to integrate access control and video security technologies. By incorporating both tools, you can ensure your security data is accessible on a single platform.  

You can leverage this integration further by applying facial recognition software to ensure a user’s facial profile matches the access credentials they’re using to enter the building. This way, no user can enter the property using stolen credentials.

Implementing MFA at your building’s entrance enhanced with AI will ensure total protection for the digital assets and sensitive data stored inside.

3. Automated Security Workflows

Automated security workflows can be applied holistically to your physical and digital security strategies. In the event of a security threat, time is of the essence. Your staff needs to organize quickly and address the threat as soon as possible to prevent a breach from occurring. Manual security workflows are time-consuming and incompatible with a proactive and successful security strategy.  

You can leverage AI to create automated security workflows based on specific security events. For instance, if you suspect a user has entered the building or one of your systems using stolen access credentials, you would need procedures to follow to resolve the threat and contain the issue.  

Manually reviewing protocols and creating workflows isn’t efficient, and it’s easier to have AI do this for you. AI can quickly generate workflows in line with your security response protocols, ensuring fast-acting security responses to increase the likelihood of successful prevention.

Conclusion

In the modern climate, a cyber-physical security strategy that addresses digital and physical security threats is the only way to keep your data secure. AI is helping to make both physical and cyber security strategies more proactive, reducing manual processes and improving insight. Consider which of your security processes could be enhanced with AI applications, and start planning your modern design for data security.