Allowed question types

Question

I was reading the types of allowed questions. Quoting:

If your question is about…

Server and Workstation operating systems, hardware, and software.
Business/Enterprise grade virtualization
Enterprise storage, backup, and disaster recovery
Network routing, switches, and firewalls
Operations, maintenance, and monitoring

and it is not about…

Anything in a home or development environment
Product, service, or learning material recommendations
Career, salary, personnel, employment, or formal education
Licensing, legal advice, and circumvention of security or policy
Unauthorized hacking, password cracking, or system misuse

And I had a question which was marked as "too broad".

My question was regarding data security: I was concerned about mounting a kind of knowledge base for a company, which could hold, potentially, data regarding security, internal policies, or even copyrighted materials. What I asked was a two-part questions: one regarding potential spionage and actual strenght of encryption, and one regarding a standard -database level or filesystem level- known solution to protect my data, without having to implement one (otherwise it would be a programming issue).

In what sense would it be considered "too broad" and how could I refactor a question with such topics so it's not marked as too broad?

Edit: Forgot to add context of the question I asked: it was regarding NSA (so it's about hostile govts), and regarding VPS, so we could discard physical theft (which is an assumed risk when you contract any hosting type). Link to the question is above.

Answer 1

Your question, as written, can be described as How do I make data secure?.

To call this "too broad" is to massively understate the situation. There are multiple books on the subject.

For this question to fit on Server Fault you would need to scope it down to a specific components and practical application - for example: I have a Microsoft SQL Server 2014 instance with sensitive data, how can I protect it against [insert threat here]? - your question could quite possibly be spread across multiple smaller, specific, answerable questions of that type.
You can also certainly ask an overarching security question but we would need more context in order to help you decide what bears the most scrutiny (a broad system architecture diagram would be excellent!).

You would also need to define a threat model (are you protecting the data from your own employees? Outside agents? Hostile governments? Do you need to be secure against physical theft of the equipment or just electronic compromise -- from the outside, inside, or both?) -- this is perhaps the hardest aspect of "doing security" (and we can't really help you there because we can't reasonably know what your threats are without organizational context).

---

In the broader context your question could also be asked on security.SE -- particularly the broad overarching "what should I look at?" security question. I'm not sure they would be able to help much with the current question (you might want to ask over in their chat room), but I'm certain they have some posts on threat modeling that might be useful...