Data protection is a term to over-arch the mitigation against failures in protection (confidentiality), accuracy (integrity) and access (availability) that can cause an impact to data subjects and ultimately, your business. Compliance is about the governance of the GDPR, and non-technical measures to adopt and adapt.

 Risk-assessments enable the decision-makers consider everything from contractors leaving with passwords and insider-knowledge and lead to changes in technology, anonymisation of databases, deletion of old, unnecessary records, role-based access to customer data and so on. 

But what about technical support and access to customer data, particularly when required on a large-scale? What measures are available to manage, minimize and control this?

Recently, cyber criminals have become more focused on intellectual property due to its prolonged benefits, resulting in them targeting industries such as the manufacturing sector, which is the third most targeted industry for cyber-crime.

The manufacturing industry is also not obligated to report breaches unlike the healthcare, financial, and retail sectors, therefore it is possible that there are a lot of cyber-attacks that have gone unreported, which potentially increases the risk of cyber-crime

Manufacturing organisations usually receive correspondence containing confidential information such as contracts, patents, drawings and additional private content, which must be protected. The problem is that a lot of manufacturing companies underestimate the threat of cyber-attacks, and therefore do not implement the necessary cyber security and protection that is necessary to safeguard their confidential information.