Unmasking the Hidden Data Dilemma

Securing Your Company's Lifeblood in the Age of Cyber Insecurity

For the average modern company today, its lifeblood isn’t money. It’s data. Data drives every part of today’s businesses, from customer orders to accounting systems and payroll, human resources to the supply chain, and on to the money through transactions and payment processing. Data underpins everything in today’s businesses. Data is vital.

One of the most pressing challenges for businesses is managing data. It is a complex task. First off, you need to confidently know where all of your data is. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of data in unknown data repositories across cloud-based, on-premise, legacy systems, unsanctioned shadow IT, and third-party SaaS and Cloud solutions, it is an unwieldy challenge.

In this article from DARKReading, Richard Rushing, CISO of Motorola Mobility, states: “…data is found in different places, sometimes it's at rest, and sometimes it's in transit. He adds that the problem is — quite literally — growing, also necessitating a rethink of protection architecture.”

Most CISOs I talk to think they have adequate data protection in place through their robust network protection and intrusion prevention and detection tools, coupled with their identity and access management solutions. Unfortunately, despite these loss prevention solutions, we are seeing an increase in the loss of sensitive data.

Einstein’s definition of insanity lives on in cybersecurity. We keep protecting the network over and over again, yet data loss keeps happening. Why? Because protecting the network is not the solution, protecting the data is!

Knowing where all of your data is across known and unknown data sources, that’s the first step. Identifying sensitive data with confidence is the second step. Then being able to classify it without the false positives into data types such as Payment Card Information (PCI), Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI), and any other type of data that is deemed to be sensitive data is the third step. Then applying data protection technologies such as tokenization, encryption, masking, redaction or deletion that’s the fourth step in the journey towards protecting your most sensitive assets.

What’s the next step? Message me, and let’s get started on the journey to meeting privacy, regulatory, compliance and legal requirements while keeping your sensitive data secure.

Written by Charlie Atkinson, CRO DataStealth