Data management security

What Is Data Management Security?

Data management security is an umbrella term for the processes and solutions organizations use to protect their data from unauthorized access, corruption, and theft by ransomware attackers and insiders.

Data management security is focused on safeguarding digital assets (e.g., documents, files, videos, and more) from being compromised, encrypted, stolen, and exposed by bad actors.

Best practices for data security include protecting physical and digital infrastructure and data with strict policies and guidance guardrails. Data management security is often part of an overall defense-in-depth cyber resiliency strategy centered on anticipating, withstanding, and overcoming the system disruptions cyber criminals initiate.

Why Is Data Management Security Important?

Nearly every business captures sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) from its customers, ranging from credit card to social security information. In return, customers expect businesses to safeguard their PII. When they don’t, consumers are often notified and their confidence declines.

Organizations that keep their data safe retain customers and protect their brand reputations. They also stay in compliance with industry and governance mandates.

Compromised data can have significant negative financial and operational impacts on organizations, including lost revenue and productivity. Ransomware is a business, costing its victims around $265 billion by 2031, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

Because ransomware has been so lucrative, organizations have seen nation states and other cyber criminals ramp up their threats. This has led to the increasing blast radius of ransomware—expanding from attackers using malware to encrypt production data (ransomware 1.0), to attackers destroying backups then moving laterally inside of systems to encrypt production data (ransomware 2.0), to cyber threat actors encrypting and exfiltrating or stealing data to expose or sell it unlawfully (ransomware 3.0).

Robust data management security helps ensure organizations:

• Keep bad actors at bay — Data is under attack from those inside and outside of organizations with malicious intent. Modern data management security gives teams the confidence to avoid paying ransom and stops cyber criminals from inflicting costly operational disruptions.
• Maintain customer loyalty — Because it is time consuming and costly to acquire customers, brands want to keep those they have loyal and buying again. Yet for every 100 customers worldwide, 15 say they have changed brands because of a data breach, according to a 2021 YouGov survey.
• Stay compliant — The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other data protection laws are designed to give consumers more visibility and control over the data they share with businesses. To stay in compliance with industry and government regulations, organizations are deploying data management security to improve data safeguards.

How Data Management Security Works?

A comprehensive data security architecture prepares organizations as much as possible to defend data and improve cyber resiliency.

Cyberattacks target production and backup data, but modern backup infrastructure in a Threat Defense Architecture thwarts bad actors by using data encryption and immutability that help defend against intruders and downtime in an environment. Should malware take a system down, modern backup solutions can also help restore thousands of virtual machines, any size databases, and more in a few minutes.

Another way modern data management security works is by using artificial intelligence/machine learning (AL/ML) to categorize sensitive information as well as establish patterns and user behaviors for alerting when anomalies appear. A Threat Defense Architecture brings together the goals of understanding where critical data lives in the environment (data security) with who has access to it (data governance) to improve suspicious behavior detection and identify potential ransomware attacks sooner.

How Is Data Management Secure?

An approach that goes beyond the Zero Trust security principles of least privilege and segregation of duties to include granular security makes data management secure. A next-gen data management platform features multilayer security capabilities, including the following:

• Immutable snapshot — Gold copies of backup data that cannot be altered
• Multifactor authentication (MFA) — Two-factor method requirements to access data (e.g., something you have and something you know)
• Role-based access control (RBAC) — Provides authorized users access based on the job they perform
• WORM — A write once, read many rule on backup snapshots
• Encryption — Conceals data in code
• Secure SSH — Secured access path to tunnel across an unsecured network
• Quorum — The four-eye-rule that requires all critical system changes to be approved by a minimum of two authorized individuals

Failback and failover, data isolation such as a virtual air gap, as well as data governance security and privacy capabilities also are important to making data management secure.

What Are Data Management Security Best Practices?

As security becomes more of a board-level concern, organizations are boosting data management security best practices.

Some of the most popular security best practices include:

• Implementing Zero Trust security principles
• Adding AI-powered insights for near real-time detection and to minimize the risk of data exfiltration
• Simplifying and automating backup and recovery; file and object services; and disaster recovery
• Integrating with leading third-party security solutions

Why Is Data Security Important in Data Management?

Data is an organization’s most valuable asset. It is also highly vulnerable to nefarious actions. With analysts expecting ransomware to attack a business approximately every 11 seconds, organizations must rely on data security capabilities to protect customer information and trust.

What Are the Types of Data Security?

Data security is a wide-ranging set of capabilities that organizations employ to safeguard their data, apps, systems, and infrastructure. Some of the most common types of data security include:

• Encryption of data in transit and at rest
• Data masking
• Backup of data on-premises or in the cloud with immutable snapshots
• Access restrictions such as by role
• Data isolation or air-gapping

What Is the Advantage of Data Security?

Data security is key to ensuring businesses remain resilient, giving a competitive edge to businesses that continuously operate. Effective data security is also a deterrent for cyber criminals. Data security helps detect ransomware attacks and in the worst-case scenario, rapidly recover from a breach.

Organizations with strong data security avoid spending budget and resource hours navigating the negative financial and productivity impacts of a breach. Data security also gives customers confidence their sensitive information is protected and being maintained according to privacy laws.

What Is the Role of Data Security?

The purpose of data security is to protect sensitive information, which can be anything from intellectual property to employee payroll to customer details.

How Do You Implement Data Security?

Addressing each of the key elements of a Threat Defense Architecture is a good way for organizations looking to implement robust data security to get started. Those elements include:

• Implementing Zero Trust security principles
• Adding AI-powered insights for near real-time detection and to minimize the risk of data exfiltration
• Simplifying and automating backup and recovery; file and object services; and disaster recovery
• Integrating with leading third-party security solutions

How Do You Manage the Safety and Security of Data in the System?

The optimal way to simplify data management security is to deploy a modern solution that has a defense in depth architecture, including strict access controls, and the ability to stop anyone trying to modify or delete the data.

Cohesity and Data Management Security

Organizations need data management security strategies and solutions that keep up with evolving threats and minimize the increasing blast radius of ransomware. Cohesity next-gen data management delivers key capabilities across five critical data security areas so organizations can be confident they are most effectively defending their data from cyber attackers and insider threats.

Cohesity data management and security capabilities span on-prem, hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments:

• Protecting backup data and systems with safeguards including immutable snapshots, WORM, data encryption, configuration auditing and scanning, fault tolerance, and flexible data isolation
• Reducing the risk of unauthorized access via RBAC, MFA, and requirements to have one or more approvers to any critical configuration changes
• Seeing and detecting attacks to stop encroachment using AL/ML-powered insights that can perform anomaly detection in near real time, automated alerting, and cybersecurity vulnerability discovery
• Strengthening security postures with both built-in and customizable integrations for the next-gen data platform as well as extensibility that encompasses the integration of value-added applications
• Ensuring rapid recovery of data at scale including clean recovery to either the same or a different platform