Sensitive Data Discovery: Scan-as-a-Service
The huge levels of information that security professionals need to deal with each month is astounding, with The IDC predicting that the total amount of digital data created worldwide will reach 163 zettabytes by 2025.
The latest report from cloud software company Domo has found that the internet now reaches 56.1 percent of the world’s population and representing 4.39 billion people, a 9 percent increase from January 2018.
Americans alone use a staggering 4,416,720 GB of internet data including 188,000,000 emails, 18,100,000 texts and 4,497,420 Google searches every single minute.
With this in mind it is simply not possible to review the thousands of records that are returned by many of the security systems that monitor and log potential threats, meaning that these systems are not fully operational.
Additionally, many systems tie organisations into lengthy contracts often with expensive appliances and time to value length can also extend to weeks and months. Coupled with extended procurement processes this often means time from concept to provision of a solution is upwards of 24 months.
Driven in part by recognition that there are now new, affordable easy to deploy technologies available to assist end users and enterprises in the secure management of high value information, coupled with the threat of high monetary penalties under new regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the UK’s Data Protection Act.
Organisations should look for a solution from innovative software providers that they can not only recommend this technology to their clients but use it internally too. Many contracts now stipulate that parties should have the ability to locate, secure and/or delete third party data at will – and be able to evidence this readily.
Searching for sensitive unstructured data across the entire digital estate – including end points, cloud-based applications and servers, email archives and internal servers, is now a significant requirement to meet both contractual and compliance obligations in a digitally resilient and privacy lead society.
The use of data discovery platforms mean that security teams no longer have time to review the thousands of alerts and logs generated by today’s data security solutions that are a necessary requirement for security and compliance reporting.
Alerting the end user in real time offers an elegant and simple interface for end user remediation. Automated checking to see if end user remediation is complete negates the need for the security team to look at each individual alert – turning the employee into an active member of the enterprise security team.
The ability to search at a granular level for sensitive data, report and log matches for compliance purposes whilst training enterprise employees on enterprise information security policies, sensible data governance and providing the tools to easily and effectively do this is key.
Cost effective Sensitive Data Discovery Scan-as-a-Service can be managed as a one-off, quarterly or annually by the enterprise themselves or a combination of both. By providing powerful search, real time alerts including on USBs and removable drives, remediation and training capabilities to administrators, analysts and end-users, the visibility of sensitive data at content level is available across the enterprise for the first time. This allows for a timely response to external requests, such as Data Subject Access or Freedom of Information Requests whilst assisting with compliance reporting and training.