Data security is protecting data in any company or organisation. It is very important to all IT companies and to small businesses. In today's competitive marketplace, security plays crucial role in the companies. It is valuable than the computer software and hardware. If there is failure in software, it can be reinstalled and in case of hardware, it can be replaced. But if it is lost, it is difficult to recover within time. So, the organisation is responsible for security of data.

Satish Kartan says that protecting data is nothing but to get rid of unauthorised users in a company and protecting the customer's information from intruders. By securing all the information the competitive advantage will increase and company will achieve business success. So, the companies should understand how security is helpful to their organisation.

Most companies will have details of the employee information, such as bank details, credit card details, address, and employee records. These are to be protected from intruders. Mostly the security breaches will happen due to hackers and because of them there is high loss to company. Without protecting customer's data they will take their business to a competing company.

If any information is lost, backup should be there to the particular data. Backup enables immediately to recover any lost data. Backup is important in cases such as hardware issues, power outage and other disasters. The system should be protected with antivirus software from any viruses, spyware or malware and firewall protection.

Also there are different types in encryption, which encodes the data so that it cannot be read and viewed by anyone who doesn't have access. So the antivirus software, firewalls and encryption are mainly available for data protection.

Data security requirements:

The main security standards which technology can ensure are confidentiality, integrity and availability.

Confidentiality: It maintains information to be confidential. It discloses information only to authorised users. Authentication methods like Id's and user passwords will identify the users and get access to the systems. It secures the sensitive data from unauthorised users. This is mostly related to data privacy that is protecting individual's personal information.

Integrity: Integrity is maintaining the consistency and accuracy of the information. Data must not be changed or modified due to unauthorised users. Cryptography plays a major role in integrity. The methods used to protect integrity include hashing of the data and comparing it with the original message. If any damage occurs, backup should be available to restore the affected data. Also digital signatures play a key role to know whether the data is genuine or not

Availability: The data should be available and able to access the information to the user when needed. If it is not available at right time, backup is the key to restore the important information. The lack of availability of information is due to natural disasters such as floods and power outages and hardware failures. By using off-site backups we can reduce the damage caused due to natural disasters.

Satish Kartan has been working with SQL Server for the past 20 years. To read more, please visit Satish Kartan's blog at http://www.sqlfood.com/ where he has shared more details on this.