Lynne Murray | Director of Product Marketing for Data Security
As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become increasingly popular, identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating data security risks becomes increasingly complex. How can we tackle this complexity? By gaining insight into how organizations handle risk. That’s the goal of the latest Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Understanding Data Security Risk survey, which Thales is a proud sponsor of.
The survey report shares critical insights into the challenges organizations face when managing data security risk and offers actionable steps they can take to secure their most sensitive assets. So, let’s examine some of the key takeaways.
Limited Risk Understanding, Limited Risk Management
Perhaps the most notable revelation from the CSA report is that organizations have gaps in their ability to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, creating significant challenges in managing data risks.
Statistics from the report drive home the scale of the issue: 31% of respondents say they lack tools to identify their riskiest data sources, while 12% don’t even know if they have such tools. This lack of adequate tooling, among other factors, resulted in 80% of respondents saying they don’t feel highly confident in their ability to identify high-risk data sources.
Other contributing factors include the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Over half of the respondents reported operating in hybrid environments, while 27% use multi-cloud setups. The fragmented risk profiles and data distribution inherent in these cloud platforms make it harder to locate and prioritize vulnerabilities and can result in inconsistent management practices.
Organizations can remediate these issues by implementing Thales Data Risk Intelligence capabilities. It unites Thales CipherTrust and Imperva Data Security Fabric platforms to provide a risk score and actionable recommendations for proactively identifying and mitigating risks.
Misaligned Teams, Elevated Risk, Compromised Compliance
The report also reveals that management's strategic priorities aren’t compatible with staff's operational realities. For example, 10% of staff reported being “not at all confident” in identifying high-risk data sources, compared to 3% of management.
Moreover, many executives (41%), perhaps unsurprisingly, want to align security efforts with broader business objectives, all while operational teams are struggling to keep their heads above water, facing resource constraints and relying heavily on manual (22%) or semi-automated (54%) processes.
Clearly, organizations would do well to automate more processes and free up time for operational teams to align their efforts with broader business objectives.
New Risks, New Data-Centric Focus
Despite the wide range of compliance, risk, and security management tools on the market, organizations are struggling to meet the demands of modern data risk management. The problem is that many of these tools aren’t keeping pace with evolving risk management requirements, forcing many (54%) organizations to use four or more tools to manage data risks.
This patchwork approach to risk management results in inefficiencies and conflicting information that can hinder effective decision-making. Thales, however, offers an integrated, holistic approach to risk management and data security. We help organizations move past siloed data protection solutions, providing a centralized and uniform deployment that prepares your organization for the security challenges to come.
Compliance is Important, But Not Sufficient for Proactive Data Security
Regulations and compliance requirements, while the driving force behind most organizations’ (59%) risk reduction strategies are leaving organizations unable to address emerging and evolving risks.
Only 11% of respondents said they prioritize identifying risk behavior, while just 12% focus on adapting to the changing attack surface. Most organizations take a reactive approach to data security that will not be sufficient to protect them from evolving threats.
Therefore, organizations need to partner with security vendors who provide AI-driven innovations and risk-based automations that can help organizations transition to proactive cybersecurity. With Data Risk Intelligence, IT and security teams can quickly discover, classify, and prioritize data based on sensitivity, vulnerability, and risk profiles while proactively protecting at-risk data using encryption and access controls.
A Risk-Based Approach is the Way Forward
More encouraging, however, is organizations’ burgeoning recognition of the limitations of compliance-driven strategies and their steady shift to risk-based approaches: respondents ranked identifying vulnerabilities and prioritizing vulnerabilities as their two highest policies, far outpacing activities such as changing policies and controls. Similarly, respondents reported valuing key performance indicators like vulnerability patch rate (36%) and security violations (35%) over compliance violations (29%), further highlighting their commitment to risk-based strategies rather than compliance-driven ones.
Thales has all the solutions you need to switch to a proactive, risk-focused approach to data security. Our advanced data activity monitoring, data risk analytics, risk posture management, data encryption, key management, network encryption, hardware security module, and data protection on-demand solutions enable customers to protect and remain in control of their data wherever it resides – across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid IT environments.
Get your copy here of the CSA Understanding Data Security Risk report.
Want to find out more about what we can do for your organization? Contact us today.
Together, these actions provide a clear roadmap for navigating today’s complex risk landscape and protecting critical data assets.