Security policies and guardrails for data access and use are essential for security hygiene. However, without a proactive strategy for leveraging this data, achieving business growth will be challenging.
Cloud data security policies are developed to protect the data in a cloud environment as almost every company moves their data to the cloud from network-based data centers. These policies must adapt to a variety of data stores, uses, locations, and environments, including hybrid infrastructures, public and private clouds, and multi-cloud environments, as more and more data migrates to the cloud.
To ensure holistic coverage, security teams within organizations check all the relevant boxes when executing these cloud data security policies. However, they are contributing to the most common complaint businesses leaders have about security teams: that security limits and stifles innovation.
When creating and executing cloud data security policies, security leaders should be aware of and steer clear of the following pitfalls:
Manual documentation
To keep up with innovation, development teams often leverage the advantages of data in the cloud to produce an increasing number of cloud data tools and storage. Since it’s a trial-and-error process, it is challenging for security to keep up with the outdated manual documentation of any new or considerably modified data storage.
Developers are less inclined to go for the most advanced emerging technologies as security teams try to limit these trial processes, which prevents the company from discovering the best solutions for its needs. Even more troubling is the possibility that development teams might quickly get around security by integrating unconventional and unapproved technologies. The problem with current manual processes is that they can only record information that security is aware of.
Also Read: Cloud Data Security – Several Enterprises Are at Risk Due to Unsupported Cloud Workloads
Lack of visibility and control
Some security experts don’t impose restrict the transfer or modification of data between cloud environments. This strategy, while helpful for business needs, ignores the exponential growth in data as well as its propensity to migrate across data environments and repositories, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly where it is. This lack of visibility and control can lead to the loss of potentially personal, sensitive, or customer data.
Establishing internal access restrictions
It may be crucial to regulate organizational access to data to prevent misuse or loss, but imposing rigid access control guidelines and limitations on data utilization results in data silos, which again stifle innovation.
Security teams should not prevent collaborative business innovation out of fear of losing control over data, but rather should see these access regulations as opportunities to promote it. The only option to avoid obstructing business processes if access control is not highly automated, flexible and self-servicing enough to change quickly as needed is to allow access broadly, placing the organization at risk.
Also Read: The Risks and Benefits associated with Automated Cybersecurity Defenses
Employing outdated data storage technology
Data storage technologies need certain skills as every new piece of new technology is added. Overflowing stacks of security solutions may cause operational mayhem and make it difficult to determine if the data stored within them is safe, leading security teams to forego adding new technologies in order to stick to what they know. This approach may again hinder innovation, or worse – lead teams to employ ineffective processes.
As data storage technologies and business use cases continue to evolve, security teams also need to keep up with their growth within the organization. Storage agnostic tools offer scale and the assurance that controls adhere to policies and standards while offering insight into the organization’s security posture.
Finding the ideal balance between encouraging unchecked innovation without visibility or control and limiting it for the sake of security control and management is necessary to address these gaps and hazards. The antiquated belief that security and innovation cannot coexist can be detrimental to enterprise security postures and for future business growth.
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