What is Data Security Posture Management?
“Cloud-speed” has become the new standard for efficiency in modern organizations, as deployment, development and other key processes are expedited to suit market needs and competitive pressures.
Development and business teams use cloud data as their fuel, leveraging and creating data stores faster than security teams can secure them, resulting in significant cloud data security and compliance risks.
Traditionally, organizations utilize security posture management tools in order to automate the identification and remediation of such risks, but the rapid cloud migration of the past decade has necessitated a new approach to new risks. This is how Data Security Posture Management was born.
The unique characteristics and behavior of data in the cloud increase organizational risk of breaches, theft, remote execution and ransomware as it is now easier to expose this data and make it publicly available.
If data was previously segregated within organizational infrastructure and only managed and used by specifically defined teams such as DevOps, in this new reality it is now leveraged to drive business on a wider scale and is used by a variety of teams and roles such as data scientists, machine learning engineers, marketing professionals, product managers and others. This shift makes maintaining an organization's security posture much more difficult.
Data Security Posture Management aims to bridge the gap between organizational business goals and a comprehensive security mechanism that will leave no piece of data behind as organizations scale in the cloud.
Achieving a sound security posture is a challenging task for all assets in any organization, but data is one step beyond the rest in terms of its complexity, controls and configurations and requires a much more detailed approach.
An example of this complexity is the possibility of data residing as an entity within an entity - a self-hosted database stored in a compute instance.
Accounting for these challenges while growing data as fuel for an organization’s growth is crucial, as is constant mitigation of risk.