Knowing what data exists, where it sits, who can access it, and how it is eventually transferred is crucial to enterprise data security, given the huge amount of data exchanged every day. When it comes to data security and the regulations and solutions required for a proactive security posture, the visibility aspect is clearly a concern for CISOs.
Defining rules and processes, ensuring that they are effective and being followed, and determining whether technologies can be implemented to help automatically and efficiently enhance the security required around sensitive data are all part of achieving full data visibility.
Challenge #1 – The Data That Needs Protection
To keep mission-critical communications flowing and avoid creating additional productivity obstacles, it’s critical to address the reality that not all of the massive amounts of data transmitted are created equal and require additional protection.
Organizations that deploy a data classification system that uses markers to only halt data that matches the established level of protection parameters can help ensure that business continues to run smoothly. Other security solutions in the environment can use metadata labels to determine whether data is sensitive and needs additional protection along its journey depending on the company policy imposed.
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Security experts can detect and sort out what data is critical and in need of protection from what data is more routine and shareable without the more complex levels of security to speed secure data exchanges with data classification in place.
Challenge #2 – Data Protection Efficiency
Many legacy data security solutions wind up blocking “safe” data in addition to the potentially dangerous or damaging data they are intended to stop. These false negative or positive alerts can spin out of control, slowing down business flow unnecessarily.
Legacy systems focus on tight control, but at a price. The data shackles can become too tight at some time, and the urge to exchange and access information becomes a major priority for productivity. Protecting data all through lifecycle, however, is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Using an A-DLP (Adaptive Data Loss Protection) solution, companies can move beyond the “block everything” approach and into the “defend everything” approach, detecting and preventing illegal sharing before a breach happens. Companies gain agility and can intelligently examine and clean both unstructured and structured (meta) data within files, emails sent through the web or cloud, and endpoints with DLP in place, ensuring the set security policy is automatically enforced.
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This flexibility is especially important for highly regulated businesses and to comply with data privacy standards like HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and others, which stipulate the level of security that data should have at all points along its journey.
Challenge #3 – Sharing Files Securely and Efficiently
After data has been tagged and cleaned, it must be sent to a third party or internally. A secure managed file transfer (MFT) system can handle the challenge while also meeting demanding end-to-end security standards. Automated workflows, as well as reporting and auditing capabilities, improve the security and transparency of large or small file transfers. This decreases the chance of human error, which is commonly the cause of file transfer issues.
When MFT is combined with Adaptive DLP, any files exchanged or received are more likely to be free of sensitive data.
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