What’s New at Fasoo?

Me! After over 20 years with leading IT consultancy, Gartner, I am excited to announce that I have recently joined data security vendor Fasoo. At Gartner, my focus on enterprise data security and compliance challenges, products and technologies led me to really understand the significance of the “Wild Wild West” nature of unstructured data. On average, I advised 30 CISOs and CIOs and other security professionals every month on the challenges they face with respect to data security and privacy.

At Fasoo, I will lead marketing and product strategies in the unstructured data security and privacy space and will do this through a series of webinars, white papers and blog posts. My mission is to provide end user organizations insights into how Fasoo’s extensive suite of product capabilities can help meet data security and privacy goals because arming your organization with the right tools is an important step toward protecting unstructured data. I will also help guide organizations through the file and people centric approach that will foster stronger unstructured data security and privacy controls.

I’ve often said in my previous role at Gartner, “It has never been a more important time to be a data security analyst” and that translates to my passion to wanting to help organizations get this problem under control. I hope you will join me in the journey. Stay tuned.

By Deborah Kish – EVP Research & Marketing

Don’t Complicate Data Discovery and Classification

Data discovery and classification is an important first step to protect your confidential data and comply with privacy regulations. You need to identify the location of your data and its value to your organization before determining how to protect it. Done right, this leads to a data-centric security and compliance program that is critical to your corporate brand and competitive advantage.

Unfortunately many discovery and classification projects stall or fail because solutions try to address all data needs, not just security and privacy. Organizations get caught up in the process and lose focus of the goal, which is to protect and control sensitive information.

There are different approaches to data discovery and classification. Content-centric approaches, like DLP, use predetermined workflow rules to control data usage. They try to classify data using complex rules and then control its movement. You may have 20 rules that try to determine if a file you are emailing contains sensitive data and another 20 to make sure you don’t copy that file to a USB drive or a cloud location.

Context-centric approaches apply rule-based analytics to assess user behavior to minimize the risk of insider threats. This might look at who creates a document, where they move it and when was it was last accessed.

These rule-based approaches attempt to model everything data and users can and cannot do. They require extensive data classification and rely on maintaining a very complex set of rules. They gather a lot of data about your data so they can attempt to determine all possible outcomes.

These approaches complicate data discovery and classification and make it difficult to protect and control sensitive data, which is your ultimate goal.

A better approach is to classify sensitive data as confidential and immediately encrypt it. This protects the data, controls user access and tracks the file wherever it travels. Rather than relying on complex classification processes to control what users can or cannot do, this approach optimizes classification and streamlines a path to protect and control your most sensitive data. You also don’t have to worry about location anymore, since the file is always encrypted and access controlled.

The goal of discovery and classification is to understand your data and protect it. Streamline that process by encrypting sensitive data and controlling its access, rather than wasting time developing and maintaining complex rules that focus on all the things users can and cannot do with it.

IT security is a growing threat for businesses of every industry and no organization can be seen as safe. Hackers are learning new methods to attack web sites and networks. Most of the time employees have easy access to company information and are often unaware of how to detect and prevent these breaches because of a lack of training or lack of security for this information. The question is not if, but when will a data breach happen?

It is very clear that data breaches can no longer be protected by perimeter security. The perimeter continues to fade as a result of increasing connectivity between 3^rd party partners and vendors, along with

customers themselves. Mobile devices and cloud computing makes this perimeter almost impossible to determine. A majority of the cost of security is spent on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and antivirus software, however, it is only effective to a minute scale. Ultimately, it is the data itself which needs to be protected and encrypted persistently, no matter where it is.

Data classification is also a key in making sure that data breaches can be prevented. Categorizing data so employees know how to handle various types of information can determine the most sensitive data rather than data that doesn’t necessarily need to be protected.

Without a doubt though, any security professional will tell you and with no disrespect, that employees are the weakest link in the security chain. Therefore, you must make sure that the data itself is secured, rather than relying on policies, or training.

DRM protected documents have the type of security that doesn’t rely on the perimeter to secure sensitive company information. With even more laws and regulations coming into play recently, encrypting your information with Fasoo’s Enterprise DRM (Digital Rights Management) can help you keep your data secure even when a data breach happens.

So when the data breach happens, will you be prepared? With the right data-centric security solution, you can certainly count on it.

Photo Credit: Jbosarl

Blog

What’s New at Fasoo?

Don’t Complicate Data Discovery and Classification

When Will Your Data Breach Happen?