Johannesburg, 25 Aug 2022
Ever-changing risks mean that point-in-time penetration testing is no longer enough to secure data effectively and ensure that data privacy and protection investments are properly allocated. Now, organisations need to understand their security weaknesses against today’s threats in real time to protect their data.
This is according to Luke Cifarelli, cyber security account manager at iOCO, who was speaking ahead of Realize 2022, Micro Focus’s biggest customer event of the year. Cifarelli will address the event on ""Demystifying data privacy and protection".
He says: “While the need to go on a data protection and privacy journey is still crucial and the four pillars of data protection of discovery, hardening, classification and monitoring with enforcement apply more than ever, they can’t and don’t apply everywhere all the time. Data creation occurs in real-time as do security threats, therefore real-time testing of data exfiltration is the most effective way to understand how well you are progressing on your data security and compliance journey.”
Cifarelli believes that when selecting a solution to protect unstructured data, a key area of focus should be in the inclusion of a zero trust policy. Data protection platforms that support zero trust make use of information about data classification and provide context about a user, devices, and other conditions that determine access, he explains.
Cifarelli says another key focus is information governance, which can eliminate redundant, obsolete, and trial or transitory data. Governance can also reduce storage and management costs, as well as power consumption, driving greener and more sustainable IT practices.
“I see maturity in South African organisations around data loss prevention (DLP) market uptake, especially on the email channel, but data lifecycle management (DLM) does not fare as well,” he says. “Essentially DLP reacts to documents in transit based on policies. It will do something in response to activity around the document. A DLM system also helps you get rid of any unnecessary copies of documents that end up in the repository, and defensibly deletes the repository copies once they become irrelevant to the business.”
He says: “A system for securing unstructured data needs to help an organisation understand the value of its data, allow it to protect data while it is in use and throughout its lifecycle by preserving that information in a long-term repository, which protects data not only now but in the future. That’s very important when adhering to legislation like POPIA.”
Cifarelli believes organisations need to take a holistic view, both managing and protecting data whilst also continuously testing the validity of the compliance and security controls.
He says organisations can avoid disproportionate budget spend on less valuable data by using ROSI (Return on Security Investment) to calculate the cost of the solution versus its returns. “When security teams need to justify the budget and show the ROI of your security activities, it is much better to rely on validated numbers and avoid guesswork, through continuous testing of your security,” he says.
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