The shift to cloud computing has enhanced the resilience and security of most organizations. In this era of unparalleled agility and scalability, data-centric security can offer transformational opportunities for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to improve data protection, compliance, and operational efficiencies, thereby strengthening customer trust. Despite this, a layered defense model is still necessary both on-premises and in cloud environments, as different paths to data have their own security requirements.
Which attack vector is catching your attention?
According to The 2024 Thales Global Data Threat Report (DTR), 93% of enterprises reported an increase in threats.
The respondents to the survey identified:
> Malware (41%), phishing (41%), and ransomware (32%) are the fastest-growing attacks
> Cloud assets such as SaaS applications, cloud-based storage, and cloud infrastructure management are the biggest targets for attack
> Human factors such as user error and failure to apply multi-factor authentication (MFA) to privileged accounts are the leading causes of cloud data breaches.
Securing data assets in a dynamic data estate
As a business expands, unparalleled access is given to developers, third parties, and employees in the development and delivery of new services to more customers. To meet customer demand, real-time data access for authorized business users requires availability, integrity, and security of the data in enterprise systems. With this in mind, implementation teams must deploy the appropriate mechanisms specifically designed to safeguard data – independent of applications, databases, and platforms– while it is at rest, in motion, or in use.
CISOs cannot afford to slow down new business initiatives
The ever-evolving threat landscape puts tremendous pressure on CISOs to have clear objectives and an understanding that their companies cannot sacrifice security for speed. At the same time, their IT and security teams must work hand-in-hand to provide visibility and control, proactively protecting their data assets that are growing faster than ever before.
CISOs must balance this internal pressure to manage costs by moving workloads to lower-cost cloud environments. This compels organizations to seek security solutions that offer dynamic policies, faster encryption, and least-privileged access controls to prevent and mitigate attacks from more capable adversaries.
Therefore, leveraging security technologies that are purpose-built to handle the complexity, speed, and scale can provide operational efficiencies and higher productivity wherever the data is stored or used, including data centers, virtualized environments, and cloud implementations.
Securing Gen AI presents many unknowns
It is a well-known fact that attackers are constantly seeking new ways to circumvent security to gain access to sensitive data. As the attack surface expands leaving gaps along the way, we can expect to see sophisticated attacks, ransomware, as well as the malicious use of generative AI (gen-AI), present many challenges to the security and privacy of critical data.
Source: The 2024 Thales Global Data Threat Report (DTR)
In recent chat use cases, there were specific risk issues that were not easily detectable by current security technologies, such as data loss prevention (DLP) tools. This is because chat interfaces may not distinguish between content and controls, making it difficult to prevent a chatbot from generating or sharing personally identifiable information (PII) that may have been embedded in its language model.
Adversaries can use GenAI to create deepfake false identities for fraudulent purposes.
More attention from already bandwidth-constraint staff is needed to understand what measures can address and mitigate these breaches. CISOs are embracing security platform solutions that combine AI and machine learning to automate repetitive tasks, and accelerate threat detection, and response.
Reducing compliance burden
To help companies deal with these breaches, numerous standards, directives, and frameworks have evolved over the years that describe how data should be protected. Legislators and industry leaders are constantly updating their standards and regulations as new threats and new countermeasures emerge.
We are seeing compliance and security initiatives converge where the sharing of inputs, processes, and outcomes are effectively helping to lessen the severity or better yet deter the breach altogether. Driving this convergence are privacy assessment deadlines and compliance with updated directives (i.e., NIS2, PCI 4.0). These require a more orchestrated effort as teams must provide evidence that the proper security systems, controls, and policies are in place. For those organizations that prioritize compliance audits, we are seeing a stronger security posture and cybersecurity readiness across their organization.
The Thales DTR findings have shown a stronger correlation between compliance achievement and reduced breaches.
> 84% of respondents whose organizations failed a compliance audit reported having some breach in their history; 31% of respondents experienced a breach in the last 12 months
> In contrast, for those that passed compliance audits, only 21% have a breach history and only 3% suffered a breach in the last 12 months
Trust, safety, confidentiality, and privacy are imperative
It is a well-known fact that attackers are constantly seeking new ways to circumvent security to gain access to sensitive data. Security leaders must lead in building a proactive and dynamic risk-based approach to security management. Leveraging security analytics, compliance workflows, and audit reporting can create stronger alliances across departments and enforce comprehensive security practices. At the same time, this collaboration is vital for maintaining confidentiality and privacy.
This is critical to prevent cyberattacks and mitigate risks as workloads move to cloud assets, such as SaaS applications, information infrastructure, and cloud-based storage. Failure to do so can lead to severe reputational damage and put the business at risk. When it comes to reliance on public cloud providers to protect critical data – albeit they may have similar features in computing, storage, applications, networking, or other services – significant differences in data protection remain. Data security becomes the foundation for open and trusted information sharing.
That is why the combined strengths of the Thales CipherTrust and Imperva Data Security Fabric platforms can help your business seamlessly transform itself into a data-first organization for protecting all paths to data.
Next Steps
Webinar: “Thales + Imperva: Trusted End-to-end Data Security”
Join Todd Moore, VP of Data Protection at Thales, and Terry Ray, Field CTO, Imperva Data Security who will delve into how organizations are optimizing their data protection strategies and platform synergies to ensure compliance, security, and operational efficiencies. Register HERE
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