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How are Organizations Modernizing their Data Security and

Management?

Published on Sep 06, 2022

Organizations globally are striving to incorporate more data-driven in

their decision-making. Today the right mix of human and machine
intelligence is vital for any organization to succeed in this journey.
Machine intelligence operations should be supported with the right data
infrastructure. For that, the organization must be invested in setting up the
same with the likes of data lakes, data warehouses, etc. However, at the
same time, these investments do not deliver the desired outcome that
organizations had expected.  

A common set of challenges that organizations often face

include: 
Choosing the right business use cases and KPIs that can lead to
 generating valuable insights for the business has always been a
challenge. 

While big data assists in improving the capability to process data

faster, organizations are proceeding to crunch more data. But, the
availability of the data remains the key aim. 

Once the data is gathered in the system, the next big challenge that
lies ahead in making the data available for other teams to use is the
cost. 

Today, the paradigm-shifting from specific cloud solutions to a cloud at

scale is becoming mainstream. Organizations are taking a re-look at their
data estates and scrutinizing avenues to address these challenges. Over
the years, technologies in the big data landscape have changed at a
constant pace. In 2019, cloud migration services reached $119bn. This
number is now expected to grow 29% every year until 2025. 

Read more: The Evolution of 'Data-First’ Strategy: What does that mean
for Businesses? 
Understanding the Complex Framework of
Securing Modern Data Stacks 
Typically, SaaS tools offer reports and dashboards within their narrow silo
of the ecosystem. Organizations extract the data from these sources and
transfer it to their analytical systems, where they fix anomalies, curate,
enrich, as well as harmonize the data for consumption. The tooling
employed for building the analytical stacks comprises an extensive
number of best-of-breed products. However, these products are often not
required to conform to any standards, thus creating a highly manual
process of integration. Due to this shift in focus, security is being perceived
as somebody else’s problem. 

Recent technological advances are leading to a rise in awareness about

modern data security. Organizations are incorporating this new mindset
as buyers are becoming mindful of the security tools that are employed
to safeguard data. The primary purpose of data security is not to stop
access to data but to facilitate more data to be used in an effective,
trusted, and governed manner. 

This data often lives outside the perimeter of an organization. A recent

study discovered that an average small business employs 102 different
SaaS apps, and an average enterprise uses 288 different apps across its
organization. So, the concerning question arises: How can an organization
secure its data across hundreds of data sources? 
Ways To Ensure Cloud-Based Data Security
& Regulatory Compliance 
Data security is a shared responsibility that demands close collaboration
between different teams within an organization, ranging from security,
privacy, and business to data and analytics, infrastructure, applications,
and legal. To design a secure, trusted, and governed architecture,
businesses must incorporate the following crucial steps: 

Read more: Data & Analytics Strategy: Must-Have Crucial Elements for
Decision Making 

1. Transforming data security to be proactive 

Traditional or defensive security was previously designed to adhere to the
mandatory compliances and regulations set in place. Failing to meet
regulatory compliances, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) along
with the more recently passed compliance- the EU's General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) can lead to severe legal and financial
ramifications. Organizations cannot neglect this must-have aspect of
data security. The block-and-tackle approach can restrict access to data,
leading to reduced utility. 
An offensive security strategy will help organizations in unlocking the
hidden potential of corporate data, also known as democratizing data.
This strategy assists in understanding the data context and tags data
attribute with technical and business metadata. This mode of data
security leads to enhancing data utility while protecting sensitive data.
Organizations that can successfully democratize their data can gain a
competitive edge over their competitors with the focus shifts from
information technology (IT) to intellectual property (IP). 

2. Separating data policies from computing and storage 

The cloud operating model offers transformational separation of
computing and storage, as it allows every layer to scale independently
and pay for using a consumption model. The next evolution is the
separation of security policies. Cloud data warehouses, data lakes, and
lake houses are gaining the limelight and redefining analytical data
stores. The ecosystem of product categories, including orchestration,
transformation, data ingestion, governance, observability, and analytics,
is mushrooming.  

Many organizations are now relying on upcoming tech advancements to

build end-to-end pipelines. Unfortunately, the comprehensive security
policies embedded in the products can often lead to redundant, wasted
effort, thus increasing the risks of falling through the cracks. By diverging
security policies in its layer, organizations can facilitate consistent
enforcement of security rules irrespective of the analytical store or
compute engine. 
 3. Collaborating to build a strong community 
The modern data stack approach, including data mesh and data fabric, is
decentralized in nature. This decentralized data ownership approach led
to distributed stewardship. Today sharing threat intelligence and best
practices across domains is critical. In many secure organizations, the
CISO, the CIO, as well as the data protection officer (DPO) must be closely
knit. Organizational data security practices should be extended to data
sharing, exchanges, and marketplaces, as a business are likely to be
judged by the way they share their data assets and products with internal
as well as external stakeholders. 

Read more: A Brave New World – Fascinating Real-Life Applications of

Data Analytics 

4. Automatingsecurity with dynamic attribute-based

access control 
Organizations traditionally created roles that determined which user was
allowed access to which objects. However, over time, organizations are
losing the plot and integrating thousands of new roles. This has led to
creating a role bloat for the role-based access controls (RBAC) method.
However, it is a manual approach. For organizations to accelerate their
data security and stay in tandem with the growing business needs, it is
critical to augment their role-based access control (RBAC) methods with
attribute-based access control (ABAC). 

5. Integrating advanced Privacy Enhancing Technologies

(PETs) 
With cyber and data threats becoming more sophisticated worldwide,
organizations are investing in advanced PETs. Encrypting, masking, and
tokenization options for data security are no longer enough to de-identify
personal data. It does not securely guard them against the risk of re-
identification or data breach. While previously, the focus has been on
protecting the data in motion and at rest. However, protecting data in use
is becoming an equally vital element of data security modernization.
Advanced PETs involve differential privacy, homomorphic encryption
along with secure multi-party computation. These approaches are
automated, continuous, and can be scaled with minimal impact on the
analytical performance of the organizational data. 

6. Enhancing data security and observability 

Data security anomalies are bound to happen anywhere in the end-to-
end pipeline. The faster an organization can detect these anomalies, the
faster it can remediate to reduce the attack surface. Lack of observability
indicates that unsecured data has persisted in data sources, unnoticed
for months or maybe years, until one day, it gets exploited. Hence,
organizations must continuously crawl and discover sensitive data in their
data sets, files, and application source, in compute engine or hybrid
multi-cloud environment. They should ensure that the data access
policies are connected to them. 

Read more: What Is Data Democratization? How is it Accelerating Digital

Businesses? 

To Sum Up 
Complexity is perceived as the enemy of data security. Today,
modernization of data security is possible only if the barriers to security
tool adoption are lowered for stakeholders. Modernizing a data center to
the cloud is a long journey. Defining the appropriate migration pace is a
critical element as it depends on the following: 

Current cloud maturities such as architecture, operating model, and

skills 

Organizational capacity to absorb change  

Mobilization of resources 

Bifurcation of activities - insourced vs. outsourced 

Once the data center has been migrated with the first set of quick-win
modernizations, with a continuous improvement cycle, businesses can
incorporate the next wave of modernization and refactor their operations.
With organizational mindsets shifting towards treating data privacy,
ethics, and security as areas of required competency, the regulatory
expectations of businesses are evolving. 

As AI tools become available to effectively manage data, enterprises are

automating the identification, correction, and remediation of data-quality
concerns. While establishing a strong stage-gating process is paramount
for organizations, it will assist them in building a tangible business case
that enables them to make a well-informed decision. 
Altogether, these efforts will empower organizations to build greater trust
in the data and how it is managed, thus ultimately accelerating the
adoption of new data-driven solutions. 

With a presence in New York, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Toronto,

London, Zurich, Pune, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, SG Analytics, a pioneer
in Research and Analytics, offers tailor-made services to enterprises
worldwide.                  

A leader in Data Modernization, SG Analytics offers an in-depth domain

knowledge and understanding of the underlying data with expertise in
technology, data analytics, and automation. Contact us today if you are
looking to understand the potential risks associated with data and
develop effective data strategies and internal controls to avoid such
risks. 

RELATED TAGS

Cloud Computing

Data

Regulatory Compliance

Cloud Data Security

Data protection

Data Modernization

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