Given that many are looking to or already have migrated some or all of their infrastructure to the cloud, data is constantly on the move. Data critical to your organization’s functioning is often moves across networks and to other locations you might have little control over. This data is also something that hackers are on the prowl for and looking to incept and steal given the opportunity. Given this new reality, a new security methodology was developed, called data-centric security, to combat threats attempting to hijack and profit illicitly from your data.
Put simply, this new method of protecting data is based on creating policies to determine what data is in need of protection and following those policies to decide who can access that data. In general, the more sensitive the data, the fewer people and systems will be granted access to it. These policies are flexible enough to move with the data when transferred but still retain all the restrictions imposed on it by the policy rules.
Changing Threats, Changing Methodology
One of the reasons the data-centric approach was developed was that data, no matter the size of the organization or the security budget, was that advances in technology that meant data had to inevitably move to different locations, often across continents gave hackers the chance to incept that data. If no security measures and policies were in place upon intercepting the data, it was simply a matter of reading whatever was stored in the data packets.
Data-centric security arose to meet this challenge by developing security software that would impose policies on data to make sure if incepted it was encrypted and couldn’t be accessed. What’s more is that these packages allowed for the easy creation of policies and provide visibility throughout an organization’s data and the devices it is stored on, be it traditional hard drives or cloud storage solutions. Such solutions act as a vigilant gatekeeper and are in line with what we at Archtis keep striving for in the face of ever-changing threats.
Changing Technology to Meet Data-Centric Needs
With the advent of renewed development of artificial intelligence and machine learning the ability to develop data-centric security software was given a shot in the arm, so to speak. Advancements in these fields allow for better predictive models to be developed around how data moves from machine to machine and person to person. Further, they improved visibility throughout an organization’s chosen data storage methods.
Visibility has always been a concern for security researchers and those tasked with defending IT infrastructure. Defending the precious data is an all but impossible task when you have no visibility over and within the data storage medium. With the current cloud migration revolution, visibility became more of a concern as data was no longer been stored in on-site servers but across an entire cloud network.
The future of the data-centric approach is based on leveraging new technologies to grant administrative staff better visibility even when working with cloud infrastructure. Further, technologies will be used to allow for more efficient scalability and data compliance with regulatory and industry best practices.
Conclusion
While the advent of cloud technology and fast data transfer has enabled businesses to grow and thrive they have likewise presented new opportunities to hackers and other malicious parties. Data-centric security, when applied right, can be the missing security piece to organizations needing to protect their data, which is almost every one of them.