As one who remembers life and technology before the cloud, I appreciate even more the incredible changes the shift to the cloud has wrought. Productivity, speed of development, turbocharged collaboration – these are just the headlines. The true scope goes much deeper.
Yet with any new opportunity come new risks. And moving data at unprecedented speeds – even if it is to facilitate unprecedented productivity – enhances the risk that data won’t always end up where it’s supposed to be. In fact, it’s highly likely it won’t. It will find its way into corners of the cloud that are out of the reach of governance, risk and compliance tools - becoming shadow data that can pose a range of dangers to compliance, IP, revenue and even business continuity itself.
There are many approaches to mitigating the risk to cloud data. Yet there are also some foundations of cloud data management that should precede investment in technology and services. This is kind of like making sure your car has enough oil and air in the tires before you even consider that advanced defensive driving course. And one of the most important – yet often overlooked – data security measures you can take is ensuring that your organization follows proper cloud data hygiene.
Why Cloud Data Hygiene?
On the most basic level, cloud data hygiene practices ensure that your data is clean, accurate, consistent and is stored appropriately. Data hygiene affects all aspects of the data-driven business – from efficiency to decision making, from cloud storage expenses to customer satisfaction, and everything in between.
What does this have to do with security? Although it may not be the first thing that pops into a CISO’s mind when he or she hears “data hygiene,” the fact is that good cloud data hygiene improves the security posture of your organization.
By ensuring that cloud data is consistently stored only in sanctioned environments, good cloud data hygiene helps dramatically reduce the cloud data attack surface. This is a crucial concept, because cloud security risks no longer arise primarily from technical vulnerabilities in the cloud environment. They more frequently originate because there’s so much data to defend that organizations don’t know where it all is, who’s responsible for what, and what its exact security posture is. This is the cloud data attack surface: the sum of the total vulnerable, sensitive, and shadow data assets in the cloud. And cloud data hygiene is a key mitigating force.
Moreover, even when sensitive data is not under direct threat, good cloud data hygiene lowers indirect risk by mitigating the potential for serious damage from lateral movement following a breach. And, of course, cloud data security policies are more easily implemented and enforced when data is in good order.
The Three Commandments of Cloud Data Hygiene
- Commandment 1: Know Thy Data
Understanding is the first step on the road to enlightenment…and cloud data security. You need to understand what dataset you have, which can be deleted to lower storage expenses, where each is stored exactly, whether any copies were made, and if so who has access to each copy? Once you know the ‘where,’ you must know the ‘which’ – which datasets are sensitive and which are subject to regulatory oversight? After that, the ‘how:’ how are these datasets being protected? How are they accessed and by whom?
Only once you have the answers to all these (and more) questions can you start protecting the right data in the right way. And don’t forget that the sift to the cloud means that there is a lot of sensitive data types that never existed on-prem, yet still need to be protected – for example code stored in the cloud, applications that use other cloud services, or cloud-based APIs.
- Commandment 2 – Know Thy Responsibilities
In any context, it’s crucial to understand who does what. There is a misperception that cloud providers are responsible for cloud data security. This is simply incorrect. Cloud providers are responsible for the security of the infrastructure over which services are provided. Securing applications and – especially – data is the sole responsibility of the customer.
Another aspect of cloud data management that falls solely on the customer’s shoulders is access control. If every user in your organization has admin privileges, any breach can be devastating. At the user level, applying the principle of least privilege is a good start.
- Commandment 3 – Ensure Continuous Hygiene
To keep your cloud ecosystem healthy, safe and cost-effective over the long term, establish and enforce clear and detailed cloud data hygiene processes and procedures. Make sure you have a can effectively monitor the entire data lifecycle. You need to continuously monitor/scan all data and search for new and changed data
To ensure that data is secure both at rest and in motion, make sure both storage and encryption have a minimal level of encryption – preventing unauthorized users from viewing or changing data. Most cloud vendors enable security to manage their own encryption keys – meaning that, once encrypted, even cloud vendors can’t access sensitive data.
Finally, keep cloud API and data storage expenses in check by continuously tracking data wherever it moves or is copied. Multiple copies of petabyte scale data sets unknowingly copied and used (for example) to train AI algorithms will necessarily result in far higher (yet preventable) storage costs.
The Bottom Line
Cloud data is a means to a very valuable end. Adopting technology and processes that facilitate effective cloud data hygiene enables cloud data security. And seamless cloud data security enables enterprises to unlock the vast yet often hidden value of their data.
