Data is the lifeblood of modern organizations, and safeguarding it should be at the core of any robust security strategy. It’s the data that cybercriminals seek to exploit, manipulate, or steal, and it’s this data that organizations are increasingly building their security programs around.
With large swathes of organizational data and workloads moving to the cloud, the traditional network perimeter is no longer sufficient to protect sensitive data and digital assets. For effective data protection, organizations need to build multiple layers of defenses around their most critical data – wherever it resides.
The Zero Trust model has emerged as a powerful security paradigm to tackle the challenges brought on by fast-evolving computing models and the widespread use of cloud apps. The “never trust, always verify” principle removes any notion of implicit trust when it comes to data access, and requires strong identify and access management controls based on the principle of least privilege.
Essential Data Protection
In this blog post, we outline some simple steps for security teams to manage cyber risk using a data-centric approach. Start by creating a solid, context-specific data security policy; followed by data discovery and classification; implementing data protection controls that also cover compliance; and finally detecting and responding to anomalous data usage activity.
Create a Data Security Policy
Your first step is to create a comprehensive data security policy. This policy should outline your organization’s processes for safeguarding data and serve as a roadmap for your protection efforts.
Define data sensitivity levels and classification tiers
Categorize your data based on its sensitivity. Not all data is created equal, and defining sensitivity levels helps determine the level of protection each category requires. Implement classification tiers to specify the protection measures required for each sensitivity level. This way, you can tailor your security controls to the specific needs of each category.
Catalogue Your Data
Maintain a centralized data catalog that clearly identifies where all sensitive data is stored. This catalog will become your go-to resource for understanding what data needs protection.
Outline mechanisms to handle breaches: Prepare for the worst by establishing mechanisms to maintain data security in the event of a breach. This includes backups, disaster recovery plans, and breach response strategies.
Discover and Classify your Data
Before implementing security controls, one must be aware of what exactly needs protection. This is where data identification and classification come into play. Organizations must thoroughly understand the types of data they handle, where it’s located, who has access to it, and its sensitivity. By categorizing data into levels of sensitivity (e.g., public, internal, confidential, highly sensitive), organizations can prioritize their protection efforts.
Discover sensitive data
Use a scanning tool to discover data stored by your organization both on-prem and in the cloud, with a focus on finding sensitive or business-critical data. Align this effort with compliance requirements.
Data Inventory
Perform a comprehensive data inventory, encompassing databases, files, structured, and unstructured sources of data. This will provide a complete picture of your data landscape.
Access Control Review
Understand who has access to your data and ensure that access is limited to those who genuinely need it. This step is critical in minimizing data exposure.
Implement Controls to Protect your Data
Implement security controls to protect your information from unauthorized access and breaches.
Review Access Controls
Implement strong access controls and employ multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add extra layers of protection to sensitive systems and data.
Encryption and Key Management
Encrypt sensitive data and securely manage the decryption keys. This added layer of security ensures that even if data is compromised, it remains inaccessible to unauthorized parties.
Create data backups
Regularly back up all critical data to prevent data loss in case of cyberattacks or accidental deletion.
Comply with Regulatory Requirements
To ensure your data protection strategy aligns with legal and regulatory requirements, you need to comply with relevant regulations. Understand which regulations apply to your organization and take steps to secure your data accordingly. Some of these steps may be:
Logging and Reporting
Maintain detailed logs of data activities and establish reporting mechanisms to track any breaches or unauthorized access.
Set Retention Policies
Define data retention policies to determine how long data should be stored, in accordance with regulatory guidelines.
Monitor and Detect Anomalous Data Usage Activity
The detection phase involves constant monitoring and surveillance of your data to identify any suspicious or anomalous activities.
Data Usage Monitoring
Continuously monitor data usage and compare with baseline usage to detect unusual patterns or behavior.
Use Analytics
Utilize data analytics to gain insights into data access and usage, enabling you to spot irregularities more effectively.
Alerting Mechanisms
Set up automated alerts to notify you when someone violates a rule or behaves unexpectedly in relation to sensitive data.
Have a plan to respond to data breaches
When a potential data breach is detected, it’s crucial to have a well-defined response plan in place.
Create Incident Response Playbooks
Establish dynamic playbooks to manage and respond to security alerts effectively. These playbooks outline the steps to be taken in the event of a breach and facilitate swift and organized incident response.
Using a data-first approach to managing risk will help you create strong defense against data breaches and unauthorized access. With effective data governance, discovery, protection, detection, and response, you can ensure your critical data remains secure, compliant with regulations, and resilient in the face of evolving cybersecurity threats.
How CYRISMA Enables Strong Data Protection
CYRISMA’s comprehensive cyber risk management platform gives organizations enhanced visibility into their on-prem and cloud data. The platform’s data scan feature enables you to scan both on-prem systems and cloud apps (Microsoft Office 365, Google Cloud, Gmail, etc.) for various categories of sensitive data such as PII, passwords, Social Security Numbers, Credit Cards, financial data and more. You can also create custom data categories to scan for! What’s more, CYRISMA’s scan results dashboards include multiple options for mitigating risk and securing the sensitive data you’ve discovered by encrypting/deleting it, modifying access permissions, or moving it to a secure location.
In addition to its data scanning capability, CYRISMA also includes powerful features like vulnerability and patch management, secure baseline scanning, compliance tracking, dark web monitoring, cyber risk assessment, risk quantification, risk scoring and much more.
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