Confidential vs Sensitive Information: What’s the Difference and How to Handle Them Properly
As organizations strive to protect their valuable assets and sensitive data against data breaches, it’s essential to distinguish between confidential and sensitive information. While both of these terms are frequently used interchangeably, they have distinct differences that heavily impact their treatment by any institution or corporation. Understanding these differences, and how to handle them, is a critical factor in preventing cyber-attacks, data losses, fraud, and leaks.
What is Confidential Information?
Confidential information refers to any data that an organization deems protected under an obligation of confidentiality. This information is classified as closely guarded and essential by the organization’s management and may include trade secrets, proprietary information, or any other information deemed to require confidentiality. Recognizing who can access and manipulate the confidential data, how to store the data, who can transmit it, and how to dispose of it properly is critical in maintaining confidentiality.
Examples of confidential information may include financial accounts, business secrets, employee contracts, patent applications, and customer information. Leaked confidential information could result in lawsuits, loss of trust from customers, or even a failing business. It’s therefore crucial to ensure that individuals with access to confidential information treat it with the utmost respect and confidentiality.
What is Sensitive Information?
Sensitive information, unlike confidential information, is data that might cause harm if disclosed or misused. This data requires a security level that limits its exposure to authorized people, systems, or devices. Sensitive data could include medical history, financial information, personal identification numbers, health records, passwords, and intellectual property.
Breaching sensitive information could lead to identity theft, reputational damage, and emotional distress. To avoid such ramifications, it’s necessary to guard sensitive information through secure databases, encryption, and access controls. Sensitive information should only be provided to authorized personnel, and only when necessary duties require it.
Handling Confidential and Sensitive Information Properly
The following strategies should be implemented to manage confidential and sensitive information effectively.
Assessing the Types of Data Collected
First, an organization must evaluate and categorize the information they collect and store. This will help identify the most sensitive and confidential data and define how to process them following best practices.
Creating a Data Protection Plan
With the information categorized, the next step is to design policies, procedures, and protocols in securing data. This includes instructions on the transfer, disposal, storage, and sharing of both confidential and sensitive information.
Access Control
It’s critical to ensuring that only authorized personnel have access to any sensitive or confidential information: this is where access control comes in. A company must apply access control measures, including user ID authentication tokens, for logging into systems, biometric identification, or passwords to control access to specific data.
Employee Training and Awareness
Employees should be regularly trained and informed on how to handle sensitive and confidential information. Awareness training sessions and simulation exercises may be used to demonstrate the potential impact of data breaches.
Disposal of Data
Businesses should establish procedures that dictate how to dispose of information when it’s no longer required. In this way, confidential and sensitive data can be disposed of with the minimum amount of exposure.
Conclusion
Confidential and sensitive information is present in almost every organization, and, as such, the consequences of data breaches are severe. It is essential to distinguish between these types of data and ensure that their handling complies with industry standards and company policies. By applying best practices in data management, businesses can protect themselves, their customers, and their industry reputation from data breaches and their consequences.
