Big data means big risk. And there’s plenty of both to go around because by 2020, it’s estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every human being.
All of that personal and highly sensitive information can mean great things for your business, but it’s also like walking around Grand Central Station with your pockets visibly brimming with cash. You look vulnerable, not to mention foolish, and you’re about to get mugged — or in this case, breached. Need proof? How about the fact that a whopping 78% of organizations experienced a successful data attack in the last 12 months, according to the 2019 Cyberthreat Defense Report
That’s because we’re basically swimming in big data and most organizations simply aren’t using the most current solutions to protect it. Furthermore, your data is constantly in motion, moving between different environments, making it an even easier target for cybercriminals.
Popular methods like classic encryption are no longer cutting it. These solutions may do a fine enough job of protecting data that’s static, but that simply isn’t how data works. To truly protect your data, you need to adopt a data-centric security strategy.
This will help you make data available where it’s most valuable while still complying with privacy regulations and protecting your users. Data-centric strategies involve technologies like tokenization, format preserving encryption and masking, which all help eliminate the risks and disadvantages of standard security solutions.
When data moves, those old-school classic encryption methods fail miserably at protecting it. Simply put, the cloud is incredibly beneficial for big data, but it’s also exponentially expanded the attack surface, thereby increasing your risk of a data leak.
You hear about devastating breaches so often partly because enterprises don’t always realize that they need to take further steps to secure the cloud beyond the minimal protection offered by their respective provider. And while a breach may be a worst-case scenario, they happen often and to companies of all stripes, with the global average cost sitting at $3.86 million.
But that’s not the only thing that can go incredibly awry when outdated methods like classic encryption fail. Other major issues include denial of access to important data (suddenly your teams can’t do their work because they can no longer access the data that wasn’t being protected), and costly noncompliance penalties for not adhering to privacy regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR.
