Cutting Out The Security Blind Spots

By Chris Hines, Product Marketing Manager, Bitglass When Henry Ford’s Model T was introduced to the world in 1908, with a list price of $850, it revolutionized transportation for the masses at the time. What many folks don’t know is that it had absolutely no mirrors attached to it. Early drivers had no visibility into who or what was behind or beside them. In fact, the only way for drivers to see what was around them was to completely turn their head. It wasn’t until in 1920 when mirrors were available for an extra charge. I’m sure some of you are thinking “I still turn and look over my shoulder.” Today, the newest generation of cars now has an indicator (red dot or car symbol) on their side mirrors that blinks when someone is in your blind spot. We have all seen the TV ads showcasing this. This blind spot awareness is crucial because changing lanes without any visibility into who is already in that lane places you and your passengers at risk of an accident. The same concept applies to data security. Companies are changing lanes, moving to cloud applications and BYOD infrastructures. Because of this, there are blind spots that exist in security infrastructures that need to be filled. Some of these blind spots include: what sensitive data is travelling outside of the firewall, where data is travelling to, and who is accessing this data. Without this visibility companies are blind to all potentially risky applications and sources. Historically, traditional security vendors and IT teams have focused the majority of their energy on the prevention of breaches, and because of this were not innovating in areas of post breach security. This is why many existing security solutions are no longer viable, because what happens when a breach does occur? If you really think about it, products like SIEM and MDM solutions are deployed today because they were the best technologies around when they were first created. They worked well for some time, and like all things have become outdated. Companies must adapt to a very new cloud and mobile world. Which is by no means an easy feat. Instead of the traditional 80% of energy spent on the prevention of breaches, security teams must become more well-rounded. Prevention, dwell time reduction and advanced security are equally important today as breaches are now a fact of life. Visibility plays a massive role in achieving them. Since data security is everyone’s job, it’s up to you, the employee to empower your company’s data security with visibility, so your company doesn’t have to be worried and unsure when changing lanes into cloud and BYOD. To learn how to gain true visibility be sure to save your seat for our webinar on February 11^th. We’ll discuss how to limit the damage of data breaches with our new product Breach Discovery.