Data Security to start with data visibility

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA

Data security is the practice of protecting digital information from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft throughout its lifecycle. It’s a concept that encompasses every aspect of information security from the physical security of hardware and storage devices to administrative and access controls, as well as the logical security of software applications. Data security includes data encryption, hashing, tokenization, and key management practices that protect data across all applications and platforms.

Whereas, Data visibility is the degree of ease through which an enterprise can monitor, display, and analyze data from disparate sources. Attaining ample data visibility within your organization brings about many benefits. The most important benefit is that you get more data from which to make informed business decisions. It allows you to create in-depth and minute data analysis for developing your projects. It allows you to see how points are affected over time, ensuring that you are making decisions with the widest range of information possible.

In today’s hyperconnected world, companies need to consider multiple areas of cyber risk throughout their ecosystem. Data security has many overlaps with data privacy. The same mechanisms used to ensure data privacy are also part of an organization’s data security strategy. Ever-increasing demands and interconnectivity put pressure on traditional, and aging, Operational Technology (OT) network infrastructures.

Organizations around the globe are investing heavily in information technology (IT) cyber security capabilities to protect their critical assets. Whether an enterprise needs to protect a brand, intellectual capital, and customer information or provide controls for critical infrastructure, the means for incident detection and response to protecting organizational interests have three common elements: people, processes, and technology.

Data security involves deploying tools and technologies that enhance the organization’s visibility into where its critical data resides and how it is used. Ideally, these tools should be able to apply protections like encryption, data masking, and redaction of sensitive files, and should automate reporting to streamline audits and adhering to regulatory requirements. When properly implemented, robust data security strategies will protect an organization’s information assets against cybercriminal activities, but they also guard against insider threats and human error, which remains among the leading causes of data breaches today. The primary difference is that data privacy mainly focuses on keeping data confidential, while data security mainly focuses on protecting from malicious activity. In the present digital world, organizations face a multitude of challenges related to the privacy and security of employee, consumer, and client data.

The average IT team spends more than half of their day just on problem resolution or network security issues. Network visibility starts at the foundation of your network. It allows you to expose and resolve hidden problems (blind spots) faster. Faster resolution times mean more TIME to innovate the network design and the applications running on top of it.

The sheer volumes of data that enterprises handle and store is growing and drive a greater need for data protection practices. In addition, computing environments have become highly complex, routinely spanning the cloud, the enterprise data center, and numerous devices ranging from IoT sensors to remote servers. This complexity proliferates the attack surface, making it more challenging for organizations to monitor and secure data

A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers says, more than two-thirds of companies plan to increase their cyber budget in 2022 to better protect their systems and data, with more than half of executives fearing an increase in reportable attacks. Better network visibility delivers the highest performance data access and data distribution to your monitoring and security appliances. Hence there is a need to improve network visibility.

According to the report, the major threat to companies is an unavoidable level of complexity that has led to increased risk, with three-quarters (75%) of executives agreeing that their organization's infrastructure has become too complex and nearly the same number agreeing that complexity has led to concerning levels of risk. Overall, executives worry that complexity will primarily lead to breaches and financial losses but also hamper innovation and undermine operational resilience.

Hence, organizations need to focus on simplifying their operations and infrastructure and determine whether complexity is necessary, according to PwC's new "2022 Global Digital Trends Insights" report. The consequences for an attack rise as systems’ interdependencies grow more and more complex. Critical infrastructures are especially vulnerable. And yet, many of the breaches we're seeing are still preventable with sound cyber practices and strong controls.