How Imperfect Is Your Data Security?

You might think your sensitive data is secure — but is it really?

The world of data security tools is a complex one that includes multiple disciplines, such as enterprise security, database administration, information governance, data privacy and data activity monitoring. There’s often camouflage or similarities among different data protection tools, but in many cases, resources that are simply sufficient aren’t good enough. In this complex landscape, you need to be aware of some of the common pitfalls to watch out for so you can be confident that your sensitive data really is protected.

Read the solution brief to learn more about securing the data that powers your business

The Most Frequent Traps

Let’s have a look at just three data protection pitfalls that you should watch out for when protecting your sensitive data:

1. Are You Focusing on Data Security or on Managing Agents?

It’s essential to have an end-to-end data protection solution; siloed strategies give bad guys a way in. One important aspect of an end-to-end data protection solution is having a certain level of automation. Data protection agents must have the ability to be deployed automatically. They need to support failover and load-balancing capabilities so they don’t have a high CPU impact and don’t create a gap in protection. If agents aren’t well-managed automatically, there is more downtime, and this poor coverage creates vulnerabilities. Some people forget to ask this question, but your data protection solution must have automated agent management so that analysts can focus on data security and protection rather than infrastructure concerns.

2. Does Your Data Security Include Analytics to Spot Advanced Threats?

Having the right level of analysis is also essential to identify and stop threats and the loss of data. Having the right views of your data — so that it may be mined, analyzed and reported on in real time — requires that a solution have a flexible and responsive architecture. While it may seem faster to write data into a multitude of separate folders, this type of solution then stores that data in raw flat files, which makes it extremely difficult and slow when trying to perform data mining, analytics and dynamic reporting. In contrast, a solution that uses a relational database for the same activities is able to provide timely, business-relevant analysis and enable deep visibility and responsiveness to protect the business. Always ask how the architecture empowers analytic processes.

3. Can You Get the Right Reports to the Right People at the Right Time?

All reporting capabilities are not created equal. To be successful — and to save you time and money — you really need a solution that is able to automate the workflow for reporting so that the process is thorough, accurate and timely. You need to get the right reports so employees may review, approve and sign off at the right time. Having an automated workflow also helps provide proof that policies are being adhered to and helps ensure that the business owners of the data are engaged as part of the process. Relying on predefined recipient lists simply will not get the job done, although it may succeed in generating an interesting quantity of email spam. By leveraging a solution with automated workflow capabilities, you are able to automate the oversight process and help enforce data security policies in a documented and reliable way. Make sure you ask whether a solution supports automated workflows.

How to Learn More

Watch the on-demand webcast “Winning The Data Protection Triple Crown – Are You Up To The Task?” to learn how the new features in IBM Security Guardium v10 can help you analyze, protect and adapt – and win the Triple Crown of comprehensive data security.

Read the solution brief to learn more about securing the data that powers your business