When you’re building a cybersecurity program from scratch, it’s tempting to try and protect everything. But here’s the reality: not everything needs Fort Knox-level defenses.
Instead, focus your early efforts on the assets that matter most — your crown jewels. These are the data, systems, and resources that, if compromised, would cause the biggest ripple effects to your business: loss of trust, regulatory penalties, competitive disadvantage, or outright operational paralysis.
Here’s how I’ve approached this in the real world — and how you can too.
👥 Customer Data: Earned, Not Owed
Your customers have trusted you with their information — and that comes with responsibility. It’s not just about compliance (though that’s obviously critical in the era of GDPR, CCPA, India DPDP, and more). It’s also about reputation and operational maturity.
Before jumping into technical controls, start with a durable data classification schema. Not all customer data carries the same sensitivity globally. For instance:
- In the U.S., Social Security Numbers (SSNs) are high-risk identifiers.
- In Brazil, the equivalent tax ID is often shared casually in everyday transactions.
If you treat all tax IDs as equally sensitive across the board, you could end up overengineering your protections in one region and missing risk in another. Data classification isn’t just a checkbox — it’s the foundation for scalable, realistic security operations.
💰 Financial Records: The Backbone of Trust
Financial records don’t just support regulatory audits — they’re essential to your business’s credibility. Investors, banks, partners, and even customers use financial data to assess your company’s health.
In the past, I’ve worked with teams where weak protection around financial systems led to integrity issues in reporting — not malicious tampering, but poor control hygiene. This is a problem that can snowball fast. Without reliable financials, you risk legal exposure, delays in funding, and erosion of executive and stakeholder trust.
Make sure you know where this data lives, who has access, and how it’s validated. Then apply controls that protect both confidentiality and integrity.
💡 Intellectual Property: Your Secret Sauce
You’ve probably heard the urban legends about companies locking their secret recipes in literal safes. Whether it’s the formula for your energy drink or the algorithm behind your recommendation engine, IP is often your biggest differentiator.
And it’s not just R&D-heavy companies that need to worry:
- Law firms hold privileged legal strategies.
- Service providers protect proprietary client lists.
- Agencies have years of creative assets.
I’ve seen organizations overlook this — treating it as “just internal documentation” — until it showed up on a competitor’s desk or got leaked in a breach. Protecting intellectual property isn’t just about encryption. It’s also about access control, insider threat monitoring, and knowing who’s working on what.
⚙️ Critical Operational Systems: What Keeps the Lights On
This one varies based on what kind of business you’re in.
If you’re in energy or healthcare? You’re talking SCADA systems, life safety systems, and anything involved in keeping people alive and the grid running.
If you’re in tech or customer service? Think ticketing platforms, customer engagement tools, and productivity suites that are critical to daily operations.
Map your business processes to the systems that support them. Once you know what’s critical, invest in business continuity, disaster recovery planning, and business impact analysis (BIA) to get ahead of potential disruptions.
📧 Executive Email Accounts: Low Effort, High Impact Targets
This might sound like a small detail, but executive inboxes are gold mines. I’ve seen attackers pivot from compromised executive email accounts to initiate fraudulent wire transfers, spread malware, or impersonate leaders to coerce employees into taking dangerous actions.
Executives tend to talk about:
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Market strategies and launch timelines
- Internal risk concerns
- Legal issues
That’s a lot of sensitive content in one place. Lock down those accounts with enhanced authentication, monitoring, and training for spotting phishing and spoofing attempts. It’s low-cost prevention for high-impact risk.
🛠️ Bring It All Together: Classify, Track, Protect, Monitor
Once you’ve identified your crown jewels, the real work begins:
- Classify data and systems based on sensitivity and business impact.
- Track these assets across your infrastructure — you can’t protect what you don’t know you have.
- Implement protections that fit the risk (encryption, segmentation, DLP, etc.).
- Monitor effectiveness through logging, alerts, and regular audits.
And one more thing — make sure you have a strong intake process for both data and assets. If you don’t know what’s being onboarded, your crown jewels might be slipping into the wild before you ever see them.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to protect everything at once. But you do need to protect the right things first.
Defining your crown jewels isn’t a one-time exercise — it’s a living process that adapts as your business evolves. Start simple. Ask, “What would break us if it got out?” Then work backward from there.
