Understanding Hybrid Cloud Security Measures

Many businesses are choosing to keep their sensitive data in the cloud as part of a current trend. Others decide to keep their private information on-site or even spread across several different sorts of locations. As a result, costly data breaches and data democratization are becoming a growing problem for businesses.

Data democratization-what is it ?

In essence, data democratization happens when all employees in a company have access to confidential and valuable business information. A high number of individuals having access to data has numerous advantages, but it also raises security issues since it increases the possibility of human error or the risk of future data breaches because not all employees may be familiar with data security best practices.

Enterprises are very likely to lose sight of their sensitive data due to the challenge of data being quickly migrated to the cloud and kept across numerous environments. According to the 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report, 39% of the compromised data was kept in several environments, making it more expensive and challenging to contain than other breaches. This is problematic because businesses cannot expect to be able to protect all of their data if they are unaware of where it is. This further complicates data security and compliance issues for businesses, which may have a number of negative effects like high penalties, drawn-out legal proceedings, reputational harm, and more.

How can companies protect their data across a hybrid environment?

When companies store their data in multiple environments, it is imperative that they have a comprehensive data security and compliance strategy in place. IBM Security® recommends prioritizing these processes within your data security and compliance plan:

1. Find and understand where your data is stored.
2. Monitor and protect your data across the enterprise.
3. Gain insights and analyze the usage of your data.

1. Determine and comprehend the location of your data.

To protect data, one must first identify where it is located, which is especially difficult when it resides in multiple locations and is controlled by multiple policies. Failure to comprehend the location and use of sensitive data throughout a company puts it at danger. Noncompliance with regulatory standards is one of the hazards, which can lead to excessive hoarding of sensitive data when it is not required. It is a data security and privacy concern.

IBM Security® Discover and Classify (ISDC) is a data discovery and classification platform that provides automated, near real-time discovery, network mapping, and tracking of sensitive data at the enterprise level across multi-platform settings. It creates a master inventory of sensitive data down to the PII or data-element level using techniques such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and network analytics. The inventory associates disparate data elements with the relevant data object and provides data lineage, business context, transaction history and the location of all copies of every data element.

By analyzing traffic on an autonomous and continuous basis—as well as data repositories connected to the network—IBM Security Discover and Classify can detect all elements on the network that are storing, processing and sharing sensitive data both outside and inside the network. It can “crawl” any repository or database when it is confirmed to or suspected of processing sensitive data, whether it is known or unknown to the enterprise.

As a result, IBM Security Discover and Classify can provide a completely comprehensive view of how and where sensitive data is utilized, whether it is in motion or at rest, structured or unstructured, in the cloud, on-premises, or on a mainframe.

Adopting a zero-trust approach to data security and privacy entails never trusting anyone or anything. This notion necessitates the constant verification of whether access to personal data should be provided depending on the contextual information of each user. With unified data security and privacy workflows bolstered by contextual knowledge and connected technologies, IBM Security can assist in putting zero trust into action. Working with IBM Security Discover and Classify, the solution’s continual discovery, monitoring, and cataloging assists in completing the majority of the required security.

2. Monitor and protect your data across the enterprise

Now that your organization is aware of where your sensitive and valuable data resides, the next step is to protect your data throughout the entire lifecycle. IBM Security® Guardium® Data Protection empowers security teams to safeguard sensitive data through discovery and classification, data activity monitoring, vulnerability assessments and advanced threat detection. This extends comprehensive data protection across heterogeneous environments, including databases, data warehouses, mainframes, file systems, file shares, cloud and big data platforms both on-premises and in the cloud.

Data sources continue to proliferate across geographical and organizational boundaries as organizations adapt to changes in the business and technological landscapes. The volume, diversity, and velocity of an organization’s data—stored across on-premises and cloud environments—is expanding. Because of the following capabilities, Guardium Data Protection can scale from one data source to tens of thousands without impacting operations:

• Centralize operations, policies, and auditing management to streamline the collection and normalization of numerous data sources for enterprise reporting.

• Use agent and agentless connections to data sources to help infrastructure teams minimize workload. Use Guardium S-TAP and external S-TAP agents to monitor sensitive data at the source.

• Monitor less-sensitive data sources with Universal Connector plugins, which offer an agentless architecture that imports native audit logs and normalizes the data to prepare it for reporting and analytics, making it fast and easy to connect to modern, cloud-based data environments.
• Enforce security policies in near real-time that protect data across the enterprise—for all data access, change control and user activities. Guardium supports deployment on several cloud platforms, including Amazon AWS, Google, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle OCI.

• Keep an eye out for sensitive data access, privileged user actions, change control, application user activities, and security exceptions.

Ensure that your data is protected across numerous contexts to deter threat actors and potentially save your firm millions of dollars. According to the Cost of a Data Breach Report, breach costs were around USD 750,000 more when breached data was housed across different environments rather than on-premises exclusively.

IBM protection Guardium Data Protection includes capabilities such as data activity and monitoring, near real-time threat response workflows, and automated compliance audits and reporting to assist businesses in implementing complete data protection across on-premises and cloud data stores.

3. Gain insights and examine how your data is being used

Having security standards in place is one piece of the issue, but another is ensuring your company has access to the tools it needs to give insights and analyze data. IBM Security® Guardium® Insights is a data security platform designed to assist clients in improving visibility into user activity and behavioral risk, meeting compliance regulations, protecting data more efficiently, and improving IT flexibility as organizations embrace new business paradigms such as moving IT infrastructure and operations to the cloud.

By storing your data in Guardium Insights, security organizations may streamline design, reduce the number of appliances, increase operational efficiencies, and free up data security teams to focus on value-added data security activities rather than infrastructure administration. Guardium Insights can ingest data from a variety of sources, including Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) sources like AWS Aurora and Azure Event Hubs, as well as Guardium Data Protection, and store it in the Guardium Insights repository.

Conclusion

Guardium Insights delivers out-of-the-box policy templates to simplify regulatory compliance in order to help accomplish data compliance goals. You can also develop your own customized policies. This enables managers to define what data is monitored and how it is recorded in order to fulfill your organization’s specific security and compliance requirements. To help speed the process of conducting and reporting on a data security audit, you can identify and schedule audit milestones and tasks.

Guardium Insights employs advanced analytics to assist data security teams in identifying risk regions, developing threat patterns, and potential application hijackings. Guardium Insights’ analytics engine learns which operations and data interaction patterns are common for a certain firm, and then assists in identifying suspicious behavior, potential fraud, or threat-related actions in near-real time. Users can explore concerns by examining specific data such as IP address, time, activity, analytics confidence scores, and more. The analytics data are run through the Guardium Insights risk-scoring engine and assigned a high-, medium-, or low-risk score based on the type of anomaly discovered. IBM Security Services Guardium Insights is a data security and compliance platform that enables clients to locate, classify, and act on sensitive data stored on-premises and in the cloud. Guardium Insights has the solution to support your organization, whether you’re searching for a SaaS or software solution to help solve your data security and compliance concerns.

Many businesses deal with fragmented security tools, cloud migration, and data democratization, all of which add complexity to their already complicated data security and compliance operations. Traditional security platforms are also frequently swamped by data volume, resulting in sluggish reporting and limited data preservation.

Using a single solution to help discover and safeguard data across the hybrid cloud is critical, especially at a time when data breaches are more common and costlier than ever. IBM Security Guardium is the ideal solution for assisting your firm in increasing operational efficiency, drastically reducing risk, and lowering expenses.