The more organizations embrace the cloud, the more data is stored in the cloud. More than 60% of corporate data is stored in the cloud today, which is double what it was just almost 10 years ago—and that figure continues to grow.
There is enterprise data security on-premises and cloud security for infrastructure, but managing risk across all of your environments is becoming more and more challenging. While developers and data scientists have free reign to capture, copy and manipulate sensitive data in public cloud environments, security and data teams have lost visibility and have much less control.
Challenges of protecting data in the cloud
Adapting to the cloud has created a number of unique pain points for organizations in terms of data protection. For one, there is a serious lack of visibility for the IT teams tasked with data security. Multiple departments can use SaaS applications and cloud storage platforms, and developers can spin up new databases without the knowledge or consent of IT. The net result is that there is no consolidated view of data across the environment.
The problem is exacerbated by a lack of context that leads to an inefficient allocation of resources. After all, not all data is created equally. Some data is more sensitive or confidential and deserves greater protection. Still, security controls are often applied uniformly for the entire environment rather than understanding the context and prioritizing data security efforts accordingly.
Cloud computing and digital transformation have dramatically expanded the exposed attack surface that IT teams need to defend. The exposure of data across a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, combined with the lack of comprehensive visibility, makes it impossible to assess your data security posture accurately. The complexity of the environment also makes it virtually impossible to monitor for attacks in progress or detect data leaks effectively.
Protecting data across an increasingly complex web of platforms and applications is a challenge. Organizations need to find the balance and take advantage of the agility and scalability of cloud computing without sacrificing data security.
Cloud data security methodology
Rubrik Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) provides the tooling and strategy needed for assuring data security not only in the cloud, but across all of your environments.
Effective data protection is dependent on four primary pillars: discovery and classification, data risk management, data access governance, and data detection and response:
Discovery and classification: You can’t protect what you can’t see. Effective data security begins with knowing what data you have, who owns it, and where it is located. Data security and data governance both require that you have a way to find, characterize, and classify known data and “shadow” or unknown data across your entire environment.
Data risk management: As your organization grows, so does the amount of data you generate. This expands your attack surface and increases the risk of sensitive data exposure. Identifying sensitive data that may be overexposed, unprotected, misplaced, or redundant allows you to remediate those risks and improve your security posture.
Data access governance: Remote work, overprivileged access, and human error can expose data to the wrong users, increasing the risk of data exfiltration. Teams can minimize the impact of security incidents by strategically managing access to their organization’s sensitive data.
Data detection and response: The ability to receive alerts on suspicious data activity allows your team to quickly contain security incidents and minimize their financial, regulatory, and business impact.
The cloud is not optional at this point. Organizations need to take advantage of the accessibility, agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency to remain competitive. However, it is also important to effectively manage security and data protection across this expanding and increasingly complex environment.
Cloud-native data requires cloud-native protection and data-centric cloud security. Modern-day cloud data protection solutions must go beyond identity and access management and basic security controls for accessing cloud applications and services and address the unique challenges of protecting data in the cloud.
Organizations need complete data observability for everything in their hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Data protection teams have to have tools in place to autonomously discover and classify new datastores for complete visibility, prioritize risk based on data sensitivity and risk posture, secure data by remediating weak controls, and actively monitor for egress and access anomalies. The DSPM is a crucial component of that strategy. It is essential for enabling data security teams to reduce the attack surface, detect data leaks in real-time, and regain control over their data.
Want to learn how Rubrik can help your organization achieve cyber resilience across all your environments? Schedule a demo