Data Types

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Data types refers to categorizing or classifying data based on its inherent characteristics, structure, and intended use.

Regulated Data

Regulated data is information that has storage and handling compliance requirements defined by national and state legislation and/or industry regulations.

• e.g.,
  • financial information, healthcare records, social security numbers, credit card details, and other personally identifiable information
• Compliance involves implementing appropriate security measures, data encryption, access controls, data breach notification procedures, and data handling protocols

Trade Secrets

Trade secret is intellectual property that gives a company a competitive advantage but hasn’t been registered with a copyright, trademark, or patent.

• encompass nonpublic, proprietary information, including:
  • formulas
  • processes
  • methods
  • techniques
  • customer lists
  • pricing information
  • marketing strategies
  • and other business-critical data
• have commercial value derived from their secrecy
• often require employees and contractors to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to safeguard confidentiality

Legal and Financial Data

Legal data is documents and records that relate to matters of law, such as contracts, property, court cases, and regulatory filings.

Financial data is information concerning an organization’s financial activities, performance, and transactions.

• include
  • financial statements, balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, audit reports, tax records, financial projections, budgets, and other financial reports

Human-Readable and Non-Human-Readable Data

Human-readable data is information that humans can easily understand and interpret without additional processing or translation.

• describes a format that is accessible and readable, such as text, images, or multimedia content
• directly applicable:
  • Security monitoring, user awareness, DLP, content filtering, and web security

Non-human-readable data is data that is not easily understood or interpreted by humans in its raw form.

• may be in a machine-readable format
• requires additional processing or transformation to make it understandable to humans
• directly applicable:
  • encryption, access controls, intrusion detection and prevention, secure data exchange, and code/application security
• non-human-readable data formats can impede the capabilities of security controls
  • because cannot be easily interpreted