Data security matters more than ever in the new normal
Even before lockdowns, there was a steady migration toward more flexible workforce arrangements. Given the new normal of so many more people working from home—on top of a pile of evidence showing that productivity and quality of life typically go up with remote work—it is inevitable that many more companies will continue to offer those arrangements even as stay-at-home orders are lifted.
Unfortunately, a boom in remote access goes hand-in-hand with an increased risk to sensitive information. Verizon reports that 30 percent of recent data breaches were a direct result of the move to web applications and services.
Data is much harder to track, govern, and protect when it lives inside a cloud. In large part, these threats are associated with internet-exposed storage.
Traditionally, system administrators rely on perimeter security to stop outside intruders, yet even the most conscientious are exposed after a single missed or delayed update. Beyond that, insiders are widely considered the biggest threat to data security.
Misconfiguration accounts for the vast majority of insider errors. It is usually the result of failure to properly secure cloud storage or firewall settings, and largely relates to unsecured databases or file storage that are directly exposed on a cloud service.
In many cases, employees mislabel private documents by setting storage privileges to public. According to the Verizon report, among financial services and insurance firms, this is now the second most common type of misconfiguration error.
Addressing this usually means getting open sharing under control, figuring out where sensitive data resides and who owns it, and running a certificate program to align data access with organizational needs.
Optimistically, companies hope that a combination of technological safeguards and diligence on the part of users—whether employees, partners, or customers—will eliminate, or at least minimize, costly mistakes.
Other internal threats come as a part of a cloud migration or backup process, where a system admin or DBA will often stand up an instance of data on a cloud platform but fail to put inconvenient but necessary access controls in place.
Consider the example of cloud data warehouses. Providers such as Amazon, Google, and Snowflake now make it simple to store vast quantities of data cheaply, to migrate data easily, and to scale up or down at will. Little wonder that these services are growing so quickly.
Yet even the best services need some help when it comes to tracking data access. Some tools makes it easy to authenticate remote users before letting them inside the gate of the cloud data warehouse. After that, though, things often get murky. Who is accessing which data, how much of it, when, and from where?
These are issues that every company must confront. That data is ripe for exploitation by dishonest insiders, or by careless employees, with serious consequences. In more fortunate circumstances, it is discovered by security teams, or by management who make an irate call to the CISO.
More approaches to data security that are born in the cloud are now appearing, and the new normal means the enterprise is motivated to adapt. As most organizations turn to the cloud for what used to be on-premises IT deployments, the responsibility and techniques to secure the infrastructure and applications that hold data are also being moved to the cloud.
For instance, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provides virtualized computing resources like virtual firewalls and network security hardware, and virtual intrusion detection and prevention, but these are an intermediate step at best.
