Cloud Data Security Means Shrinking the “Data Attack Surface”

As compliance breaches rise and hefty fines follow, establishing and maintaining strict compliance has become a top priority for enterprises. However, compliance isn't a one-time or  even periodic task or something you can set and forget. To stay ahead, organizations are embracing continuous compliance - a proactive, ongoing strategy to meet regulatory requirements and uphold security standards.

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Let’s explore what continuous compliance is, the advantages it offers, some challenges it may present, and how Sentra can help organizations achieve and sustain it.

What is Continuous Compliance?

Continuous compliance is the ongoing process of monitoring a company’s security practices and applying appropriate controls to ensure they consistently meet regulatory standards and industry best practices. Instead of treating compliance as a one-time task, it involves real-time monitoring to catch and address non-compliance issues as they happen. It also includes maintaining a complete inventory of where your data is at all times, what risks and security posture is associated, and who has access to it. This proactive approach ensures you are always ‘audit ready’ and helps avoid last-minute fixes before audits or cyber attacks, ensuring continuous security across the organization.

Why Do Companies Need Continuous Compliance?

Continuous compliance is essential for companies to ensure they are always aligned with industry regulations and standards, reducing the risk of violations and penalties. 

Here are a few key reasons why it's crucial:

1. Regulatory Changes: Compliance standards frequently evolve. Continuous monitoring ensures companies can adapt quickly to new regulations without major disruptions.
2. Avoiding Fines and Penalties: Non-compliance can lead to hefty fines, legal actions, or even loss of licenses. Staying compliant helps avoid these risks.
3. Protecting Reputation: Data breaches, especially in industries dealing with sensitive data, can damage a company’s reputation. Continuous compliance helps protect established trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders.
4. Reducing Security Risks: Many compliance frameworks are designed to enhance data security. Continuous compliance ensures that a company’s security posture is always up-to-date, reducing the risk of data breaches.
5. Operational Efficiency: Automated, continuous compliance monitoring can streamline processes, reducing manual audits and interventions, saving time and resources.

For modern businesses, especially those managing sensitive data in the cloud, a continuous compliance strategy is critical to maintaining a secure, efficient, and trusted operation.

Cost Considerations for Compliance Investments

Investing in continuous compliance can lead to significant long-term savings. By maintaining consistent compliance practices, organizations can avoid the hefty fines associated with non-compliance, minimize resource surges during audits, and reduce the impacts of breaches through early detection. Continuous compliance provides security and financial predictability, often resulting in more manageable and predictable expenses.

In contrast, periodic compliance can lead to fluctuating costs. While expenses may be lower between audits, costs typically spike as audit dates approach. These spikes often result from hiring consultants, deploying temporary tools, or incurring overtime charges. Moreover, gaps between audits increase the risk of undetected non-compliance or security breaches, potentially leading to significant unplanned expenses from fines or mitigation efforts.

When evaluating cost implications, it's crucial to look beyond immediate expenses and consider the long-term financial impact. Continuous compliance not only offers a steadier expenditure pattern but also potential savings through proactive measures. On the other hand, periodic compliance can introduce cost variability and financial uncertainties associated with risk management.

Challenges of Continuous Compliance

1. Keeping Pace with Technological Advancements
   The fast-evolving tech landscape makes compliance a moving target. Organizations need to regularly update their systems to stay in line with new technology, ensuring compliance procedures remain effective. This requires investment in infrastructure that can adapt quickly to these changes. Additionally, keeping up with emerging security risks requires continuous threat detection and response strategies, focusing on real-time monitoring and adaptive security standards to safeguard against new threats.
2. Data Privacy and Protection Across Borders
   Global organizations face the challenge of navigating multiple, often conflicting, data protection regulations. To maintain compliance, they must implement unified strategies that respect regional differences while adhering to international standards. This includes consistent data sensitivity tagging and secure data storage, transfer, and processing, with measures like encryption and access controls to protect sensitive information.
3. Internal Resistance and Cultural Shifts
   Implementing continuous compliance often meets internal resistance, requiring effective change management, communication, and education. Building a compliance-oriented culture, where it’s seen as a core value rather than a box-ticking exercise, is crucial.

Organizations must be adaptable, invest in the right technology, and create a culture that embraces compliance. This both helps meet regulatory demands and also strengthens risk management and security resilience.

How You Can Achieve Continuous Compliance With Sentra

First, Sentra automates data discovery and classification and takes a fraction of the time and effort it would take to manually catalog all sensitive data. It’s far more accurate, especially when using a solution that leverages LLMs to classify data with more granularity and rich context.  It’s also more responsive to the frequent changes in your modern data landscape.

Sentra also can automate the process of identifying regulatory violations and ensuring adherence to compliance requirements using pre-built policies that update and evolve with compliance changes (including policies that map to common compliance frameworks). It ensures that sensitive data stays within the correct environments and doesn’t travel to regions in violation of retention policies or without data encryption.

In contrast, manually tracking data inventory is inefficient, difficult to scale, and prone to errors and inaccuracies. This often results in delayed detection of risks, which can require significant time and effort to resolve as compliance audits approach.

Secure our World: Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2024

As we kick off October's Cybersecurity Awareness Month and think about this year’s theme, “Secure Our World,” it’s important to remember that safeguarding our digital lives doesn't have to be complex. Simple, proactive steps can make a world of difference in protecting yourself and your business from online threats. In many cases, these simple steps relate to data — the sensitive information about users’ personal and professional lives. As a business, you are largely responsible for keeping your customers' and employees’ data safe. Starting with cybersecurity is the best way to ensure that this valuable information stays secure, no matter where it’s stored or how you use it.

Keeping Personal Identifiable Information (PII) Safe

Data security threats are more pervasive than ever today, with cybercriminals constantly evolving their tactics to exploit vulnerabilities. From phishing attacks to ransomware, the risks are not just technical but also deeply personal — especially when it comes to protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a perfect time to reflect on the importance of strong data security. Businesses, in particular, can contribute to a safer digital environment through Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). DSPM helps businesses - big and small alike -  monitor, assess, and improve their security posture, ensuring that sensitive data, such as PII, remains protected against breaches. By implementing DSPM, businesses can identify weak spots in their data security and take action before an incident occurs, reinforcing the idea that securing our world starts with securing our data.

Let's take this month as an opportunity to Secure Our World by embracing these simple but powerful DSPM measures to protect what matters most: data.

5 Cybersecurity Tips for Businesses

1. Discover and Classify Your Data: Understand where all of your data resides, how it’s used, and its levels of sensitivity and protection. By leveraging discovery and classification, you can maintain complete visibility and control over your business’s data, reducing the risks associated with shadow data (unmanaged or abandoned data).
2. Ensure data always has a good risk posture: Maintain a strong security stance by ensuring your data always has a good posture through Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). DSPM continuously monitors and strengthens your data’s security posture (readiness to tackle potential cybersecurity threats), helping to prevent breaches and protect sensitive information from evolving threats.
3. Protect Private and Sensitive Data: Keep your private and sensitive data secure, even from internal users. By implementing Data Access Governance (DAG) and utilizing techniques like data de-identification and masking, you can protect critical information and minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
4. Embrace Least-Privilege Control: Control data access through the principle of least privilege — only granting access to the users and systems who need it to perform their jobs. By implementing Data Access Governance (DAG), you can limit access to only what is necessary, reducing the potential for misuse and enhancing overall data security.‍
5. Continual Threat Monitoring for Data Protection: To protect your data in real-time, implement continual monitoring of new threats. With Data Detection and Response (DDR), you can stay ahead of emerging risks, quickly identifying and neutralizing potential vulnerabilities to safeguard your sensitive information.

How Sentra Helps Secure Your Business’s World

Today, a business's “world” is extremely complex and ever-changing. Users can easily move, change, or copy data and connect new applications/environments to your ecosystem. These factors make it challenging to pinpoint where your data resides and who has access to it at any given moment. 

Sentra helps by giving businesses a vantage point of their entire data estate, including multi-cloud and on-premises environments. We combine all of the above practices—granular discovery and classification, end-to-end data security posture management, data access governance, and continuous data detection and response into a single platform. To celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Day, check out how our data security platform can help improve your security posture.

Addressing data protection in today’s data estates requires innovative solutions. Data in modern environments moves quickly, as countless employees in a given organization can copy, move, or modify sensitive data within seconds. In addition, many organizations operate across a variety of on premises environments, along with multiple cloud service providers and technologies like PaaS and IaaS. Data quickly sprawls across this multifaceted estate as team members perform daily tasks. 

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Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is a key technology that meets these challenges by discovering and classifying sensitive data and then protecting it wherever it goes. DSPM helps organizations mitigate risks and maintain compliance across a complex data landscape by focusing on the continuous discovery and monitoring of sensitive information. 

If you're not familiar with DSPM, you can check out our comprehensive DSPM guide to get up to speed. But for now, let's delve into why DSPM is becoming indispensable for modern cloud enterprises.

Why is DSPM Important?

DSPM is an innovative cybersecurity approach designed to safeguard and monitor sensitive data as it traverses different environments. This technology focuses on the discovery of sensitive data across the entire data estate, including cloud platforms such as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, as well as on-premises systems. DSPM assesses exposure risks, identifies who has access to company data, classifies how data is used, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements like GDPR, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA, and continuously monitors data for emerging threats.

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As organizations scale up their data estate and add multiple cloud environments, on-prem databases, and third-party SaaS applications, DSPM also helps them automate key data security practices and keep pace with this rapid scaling. For instance, DSPM offers automated data tags that help businesses better understand the deeper context behind their most valuable assets — regardless of location within the data estate. It leverages integrations with other security tools (DLP, CNAPP, etc.) to collect this valuable data context, allowing teams to confidently remediate the security issues that matter most to the business.

What are the Benefits of DSPM?

DSPM empowers all security stakeholders to monitor data flow, access, and security status, preventing risks associated with data duplication or movement in various cloud environments. It simplifies robust data protection, making it a vital asset for modern cloud-based data management.

Now, you might be wondering, why do we need another acronym? 

Let's explore the top five benefits of implementing DSPM:

1) Sharpen Visibility When Identifying Data Risk

DSPM enables you to continuously analyze your security posture and automate risk assessment across your entire landscape. It can detect data concerns across all cloud-native and unmanaged databases, data warehouses, data lakes, data pipelines, and metadata catalogs. By automatically discovering and classifying sensitive data, DSPM helps teams prioritize actions based on each asset’s sensitivity and relationship to policy guidelines.

Automating the data discovery and classification process takes a fraction of the time and effort it would take to manually catalog all sensitive data. It’s also far more accurate, especially when using a DSPM solution that leverages LLMs to classify data with more granularity and rich meta-data. In addition, it ensures that you stay up-to-date with the frequent changes in your modern data landscape.

2) Strengthen Adherence with Security & Compliance Requirements 

DSPM can also automate the process of identifying regulatory violations and ensuring adherence to custom and pre-built policies (including policies that map to common compliance frameworks). By contrast, manually implementing policies is prone to errors and inaccuracies. It’s common for teams to misconfigure policies that either overalert and inhibit daily work or miss significant user activities and changes to access permissions.

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Instead, DSPM offers policies that travel with your data and automatically reveal compliance gaps. It ensures that sensitive data stays within the correct environments and doesn’t travel to regions with retention policies or without data encryption.

3) Improve Data Access Governance

Many DSPM solutions also offer data access governance (DAG). This functionality enforces the appropriate access permissions for all user identities, third parties, and applications within your organization. DAG automatically ensures that the proper controls follow your data, mitigating risks such as excessive permission, unauthorized access, inactive or unused identities and API keys, and improper provisioning/deprovisioning for services and users.

By using DSPM to govern data access, teams can successfully achieve the least privilege within an ever-changing and growing data ecosystem. 

4) Minimize your Data Attack Surface

DSPM also enables teams to detect unmanaged sensitive data, including mislocated, shadow, or duplicate assets. Its powerful data detection capabilities ensure that sensitive data, such as historical assets stored within legacy apps, development test data, or information within shadow IT apps, don’t go unnoticed in a lower environment. By automatically finding and classifying these unknown assets, DSPM minimizes your data attack surface, controls data sprawl, and better protects your most valuable assets from breaches and leaks.

5) Protect Data Used by LLMs

DSPM also extends to LLM applications, enabling you to maintain a strong risk posture as your team adopts new technologies. It considers LLMs as part of the data attack surface, applying the same DAG and data discovery/classification capabilities to any training data leveraged within these applications. 

By including LLMs in your overarching data security approach, DSPM alleviates any GenAI data privacy concerns and sets up your organization for future success as these technologies continue to evolve.

Enhance Your DSPM Strategy with Sentra

Sentra offers an AI-powered DSPM platform that moves at the speed of data, enabling you to strengthen your data risk posture across your entire hybrid ecosystem. Our platform can identify and mitigate data risks and threats with deep context, map identities to permissions, prevent exfiltration with a modern DLP, and maintain a rich data catalog with details on both known and unknown data. 

In addition, our platform runs autonomously and only requires minimal administrative support. It also adds a layer of security by discovering and intelligently categorizing all data with removing it from your environment. 

Conclusion

DSPM is quickly becoming an essential tool for modern cloud enterprises, offering comprehensive benefits to the complex challenges of data protection. By focusing on discovering and monitoring sensitive information, DSPM helps organizations mitigate risks and maintain compliance across various environments, including cloud and on-premises systems.

The rise of DSPM in the past few years highlights its importance in enhancing security. It allows security teams to monitor data flow, access, and status, effectively preventing data duplication or movement risks. With advanced threat detection, improved compliance and governance, detailed access control, rapid incident response, and seamless integration with cloud services, DSPM provides significant benefits and advantages over other data security solutions. Implementing DSPM is a strategic move for organizations aiming to fortify their data protection strategies in today's digital landscape.