How many times have we found out that the data we are working with, either in testing or development, belong to real customers or users? Although it may not seem like it is a common practice in many companies. Working with real data is one of the factors that increase the risk of suffering a security breach in a company.

According to IBM's 2021 Data Security Breach Cost Report, these data breaches have increased by 10% in just one year and 135% in the last 6 years. This data corroborates that there is a trend in the search for this type of vulnerabilities in companies.

Data is increasingly necessary to make strategic decisions in companies and to anticipate events. companies and to stay ahead of the curve. This is beyond any doubt and, above all, it is something very necessary in the highly competitive environments in which we move nowadays. But we do not only work with this real data to create business hypotheses and make decisions, but it is also used to test the new features in our products.

In many cases, these data security breaches are caused by a misconduct in the company's own data processing. Generally, when we talk about this, the use of data for commercial or marketing purposes comes to mind, but which developer hasn't sent an email to real users on a new feature without it having released into production? Which QA hasn't been looking at the activity history of real users while testing the latest developments?.

Although we believe that this may be more or less under control, these are also can also lead to data leakage. Mainly, because they are people inside the organization who use real data without being authorized by their owners in order to be used and manipulated.

In the software creation process we use different environments to build our applications: development environments, test environments, pre-production... Many of these environments that we share with our teams do not have the same security as production environments. We do not focus on them, because doing so often increases maintenance and configuration costs considerably. Maintenance and configuration costs considerably. The main problem that happens in these situations is that, any person with technical knowledge and who intends to do harm to a company is aware of this. Therefore, these environments are likely to be targets for exploit.

Another important risk is that our teams often have copies of the sensitive data on their own computers. What would happen if one of those computers is stolen and falls into the wrong hands?

As we can see, the reasons why data security can be compromised are varied and some of them can be prevented. If you are interested in knowing how to work with data in a safe way to avoid or minimize these risks, do not hesitate to minimize these risks do not hesitate to contact us, and we at Gigantics will be happy to help you.