5 Data Security Trends You Might Be Missing

Originally published by Rubrik.

Written by Atul Ashok, Rubrik.

Malware is becoming more sophisticated, and it would be impossible to prevent and defend from every single cyber threat out there.

As the digital dependence of enterprises grows in tandem with the enterprise’s growth, we are seeing some consistent trends that can be mapped to their exacerbating cyber risk.

Organizations have embraced enterprise, cloud, and SaaS applications

To remain competitive and agile, in addition to traditional enterprise applications, organizations are expanding their cloud and SaaS toolkit. So much so, Gartner estimates approximately $600B in spending on cloud services in 2023. Organizations are pivoting to enable their employees towards better productivity and provide better services to their customers. This in turn has increased the organization’s data risk and further increased their attack surface.

Organizations have larger portfolios of ever more complex applications with varying business objectives for availability

With the growing number of applications comes the requirement to keep track of the data being ingested or produced by these different sources. Some reports suggest that 56% of all apps are Shadow IT, or owned and managed outside of IT. This has led to uncertainty in organizations’ cyber preparedness, ability to quickly identify a recovery point, and a growing recovery time due to the added complexity.

Organizations must comply with growing and ever-evolving regulatory pressures

The large trove of data generated on a daily basis is turning into a task of its own to classify and monitor. And monitoring this incoming data to ensure the organization is in compliance with regulatory requirements is important.

Organizations are facing varying severities of malware with growing amounts of dwell time

The increasing complexity of cyber attacks is resulting in threat indicators that are that much harder to detect. Add to this the extended dwell times or the lateral movement of the planted malware and it becomes that much harder for the organization to contain and recover from the attack. According to Sophos, the attacker's dwell time has increased by 36% in 2021.

Organizational barriers and siloed tools are not keeping up with the rise in malware

The multitude of tools and organizational barriers, like unmanaged data rules and policies and complex organizational structure, could result in poor visibility and coordination when it comes to responding to cyber incidents. This in turn can impact the speed of recovery. Apart from lower coordination, the lack of integration amongst these siloed tools also potentially increases the number of data sources that need to be tracked and classified.

In today's competitive landscape, it is even more important to secure your data to defend against cyber attacks. Taking the necessary measures can minimize the weaknesses that make an organization vulnerable to a cyber attack and lower its impact. Here are a few data security best practices that we suggest for every organization:

• Use a centralized platform for backups: To secure your data across enterprise, cloud, and SaaS workloads, use a centralized platform for backups. An immutable and logically air-gapped backup solution with embedded encryption, authentication, integrity checks, and other security controls can help avoid the compromise of backup data and better safeguard your data.
• Automated the enforcement of data security policies: One way to ensure proper handling of the abundance of data generated by the plethora of applications used in an organization is to adopt automated enforcement of data security policies. This allows organizations to better enforce data security policies, and test and execute recovery workflows so that business objectives will be consistently met.
• Use an automated data discovery solution to understand sensitive data exposure visibility and manage data risk at the same time.
• Use machine learning to reduce the impact of an attack: Intelligent solutions with machine learning (ML) capabilities can detect malicious changes in your data at an accelerated pace to ensure fast and safe recoveries in comparison to solutions without ML.
• Integrations with SIEM/SOAR solutions: Enable organizations to improve cross-functional collaboration and respond that much faster. If such a solution would also provide API hooks to pull the required information into an existing dashboard of choice for the IT Ops or SecOps team in the organization, it will also reduce the swivel chair mechanism teams go through when gathering the required information from various sources.

Organizations need to be aware of the fact that cybercriminals are working around the clock to defeat existing cybersecurity systems. And with the spike in the number of sophisticated malware attacks seen in recent times, adopting the right solution can go a long way in minimizing the attack surface for an organization, especially when it comes to safeguarding their data.