Today, enterprises are under pressure to improve the power and reduce the cost of running mission-critical business applications by migrating to modern software architectures. By breaking down the silos between adjacent teams and the tools they use, security teams can do this at the same time as they take steps toward zero trust and true security unification.

Due to digital transformation challenges, enterprises are often refactoring apps to become more modular and containerized. They shift to software-as-a-service for email, workforce management and collaboration applications. Additionally, they tend to leverage data as a shared resource between employees, departments and partners. Enterprises also use artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to find untapped value and embrace hybrid multicloud to match the right workload to the right cloud environment. 

Success with all this digital transformation depends on one underlying requirement — data security. 

Security Silos and Other Digital Transformation Challenges

Security organizations need to enable business transformations, but striking the right balance between technology enablement and security can be challenging.

This is especially the case as the distinct security teams within the organization continue to amass tools and processes isolated within their department. They become increasingly siloed as they address new IT environments and use cases specific to them. 

As a result, security leaders are stressed with too much to do, too many disconnected tools, too much complexity and too many alerts. Likewise, their teams and tools have become increasingly siloed as new data environments and security use cases have emerged.

Siloed security teams, processes and tools no longer scale. This creates pressure for chief information security officers to unify their resources in order to achieve a holistic set of objectives.

What is Digital Transformation?

As companies increasingly embrace modern technology paradigms, such as hybrid multicloud, the increased sprawl of data across diverse environments has become a major area of concern for data security teams. For example, data is moving to the cloud at a tremendous rate. Security teams cannot keep up with using traditional tools and approaches.

Today’s hybrid multicloud world is rampant with new security threats as well as emerging data privacy, compliance and regulatory requirements.

Corporate reputation and customer loyalty depend heavily on the ability to ensure data security, resiliency and compliance. So getting a handle on data must remain a top priority for security teams.

Does your organization have an effective means to:

• Identify where data is being stored and how it is being accessed?
• Uncover deviations in data access and control policies that suggest potential risks?
• Mitigate issues proactively to avoid potential breaches?

More than ever, data security teams need a complete view of how their organization’s sensitive data is being stored, shared and accessed in order to effectively assess, prioritize and respond to risk.  

Breaking Down Security Silos

Security concerns must not prevent technological advancements in the workplace. Instead, security organizations should take a more comprehensive and open approach to data security. This can cut down on the amount of siloing negatively impacting performance. 

The most effective security teams focus on enabling business outcomes with an acceptable level of risk. A comprehensive and open approach to data protection, one which draws upon zero trust security practices, is critical for those teams. However, this requires security teams to centralize data security and compliance information across on-premises and cloud-hosted environments. This allows them to visualize risk across hybrid multicloud data stores in one place. It also lets them to apply advanced analytics and AI to a common data set to understand the details underpinning risk. The task of setting and executing standard policies and workflows across environments can become easier. 

Additionally, it’s critical that the entire security organization share relevant information across adjacent teams, including threat management, data security and identity and access management. Collaboration across these areas streamlines risk investigations and improves coordination on mitigation and remediation actions.

Unified Security at Scale

It’s critical that security solutions break down silos. Doing so can provide connection to an open ecosystem of third-party security tools, data and clouds. It also increases cross-functional sharing of data, analytics and knowledge. Teams can make it easier to execute their common services and runbooks (i.e. case management, asset enrichment, workflow automation and orchestration).

It’s important for security organizations to consider the architecture of their security solutions, ensuring they are open and flexible enough to deploy and run on-premise, private cloud and/or public cloud without getting caught in a silo.