The Four-Step Approach to Modernizing Your DAM Strategy

Effective data security is critical to an organization’s success and requires a strategy that aligns with the company’s objectives and those of its stakeholders. As the data landscape changes, most Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) solutions struggle to meet new data security requirements. The result for many organizations is inhibited innovation and growth. It is time for security teams to modernize their traditional DAM techniques so they can ensure data security moves in lockstep with technological innovation in their organizations.

Organizations today need a solution that complements their existing DAM tools by extending the ability to connect to any data source and secure critical data in both on-premise and cloud-managed infrastructures. The solution must also be able to enrich data with critical intelligence to improve analytics and automation responses to behaviors that violate security policy. Overlaying a data security fabric on an existing DAM strategy enables a transformation that helps accelerate business innovation while at the same time mitigating security risk, reducing the cost of non-compliance, and controlling costs.

In this post, we’ll articulate a four-part process that, when implemented thoughtfully and completely, can modernize your DAM strategy and help build a security posture that keeps up with the speed of business.

1. More comprehensive data management. To start the process, you must solve for all of your raw data. That means gaining visibility beyond the data you need to monitor for compliance and achieving total visibility into your complete data repository. Your solution must streamline data collection to elevate operational focus from collection to consumption. You must have the capacity to ingest, consolidate and store any data feed, agent-based or agentless, as well as account for affordable long-term data retention.

2. Leverage data more effectively. Once you have access to 100% of your data repository, you must be able to see it all from a single location and make the data accessible and usable to people in your organization that consume the collected data for analysis. Unlocking access to contextually enriched, high-value data empowers new use cases and users to do self-service reporting and make themselves an integral part of securing sensitive data.

3. Better data analytics and interpretation. Once your solution has added intelligent context to your data, it becomes much easier to interpret what you have collected and determine what it means in terms of data security. Your solution should exploit extensible analytics to distill data and decision trees into manageable information. This will optimize SOC/Splunk performance, help with complex correlations, and facilitate the use of flexible UEBA engines.

4. Operationalize the process. Your solution should automate workflows that enable you to apply data security practices efficiently for compliance and risk reduction. No matter how many new databases – on-premise and cloud-managed – become part of your data repository, your solution should enable teams to monitor them quickly and consistently without slowing down the business. Having transformed manual efforts into efficient business processes, your solution should enable cross-silo workflows, full enterprise integrations, and integrated SOAR capabilities.

From a DAM strategy to a data security strategy

When implementing your DAM modernization plan, get the most out of it by paying special attention to:

• Ensuring easy data collection, visibility and management – this is the critical foundation step.
• Once the data is accessible, make sure you expand consumption by enabling new users and use cases.
• Ensuring you have solid analytics capacity in place for interpretation after your solution turns raw data into actionable information.
• Automation, because it is the “grease” for efficiency and expanded capabilities.

Imperva can help modernize your DAM

Most DAM users need help to make their current tools scale to enterprise needs, and Imperva has exactly the right solution to do it. Imperva’s Data Security Fabric (DSF) was born in the cloud but built by the engineers and database security experts that created IBM Guardium. Imperva DSF is purpose-built to modernize traditional DAM tools like Guardium while enabling organizations to preserve their investment in that system. Imperva can certainly help DAM tool users evolve their basic data monitoring activities into a more comprehensive data-centric security program. Contact us to learn more.