Automating Remediation Processes for Data Security Posture Management
If you are looking into data security posture management, I’m sure you realize that automating remediation activities for data security posture management is a vital tool for maintaining the security and integrity of data inside an organization. Automating these processes enables organizations to identify and respond to security threats in real time. This decreases the amount of time it takes to handle problems and lowers the danger of data breaches.
Thus, before we look into how we can automate it, it is important to understand how data security posture management helps you achieve your goals.
How is Data Security Posture Management Used?
Organizations that place all of their IT and application infrastructure onto one or more clouds are the main users of data security posture management. Data security posture management is particularly beneficial for organizations that have committed to a cloud-first vision and are moving away from a mixed cloud/on-premises infrastructure.
Automatically find and categorize data across all clouds.
Even more so if they are ad hoc duplications made by data scientists and other data engineers for things like temporary testing, shadow data stores, and abandoned data stores are regularly discovered outside of the bounds of standard security measures. By working closely with the data and engineering teams to automatically find, categorize, and validate all data across all cloud accounts, this data security posture management use case is highly advantageous to security teams. Its processes are designed for structured and unstructured data inventory across native databases, block storage, and file storage.
Avoid exposing cloud data and reduce the attack surface.
As it encourages innovation, businesses adopt cloud-first strategies, which result in ongoing modifications to microservices, data stores, and cloud architectures. To ensure that the exposure of cloud data and the corresponding attack surface is kept to a minimum, security teams use data security posture management to coordinate closely with data and engineering teams.
The data security posture management platform will enable the automatic identification of data at risk by continuously checking data storage and linked resources for configuration issues, detecting weak applications, and finding exposed resources with access to sensitive data. The data security posture management platform will enable the automatic identification of data at risk.
Keep track of data access rights and implement the least privilege.
Inappropriate access permissions make it possible for sensitive data to be misused or exposed, whether by insider error or malicious rights-holder design. With the help of data security posture management, security personnel can easily and accurately check the access rights for all cloud data stores.
The data security posture management platform keeps track of all users’ access privileges and compares it to actual usage to identify inactive users and those with excessive privileges. IT managers can rapidly remove inactive users whose accounts can be a risk to the data by removing them from the to-do list that results.
Actively keep an eye out for legal compliance.
Many required rules and regulations need compliance checks for data security. Through regular checks against important benchmarks and related controls, the data security posture management platform gives governance stakeholders the ability to remain ahead of compliance and audit needs.
The data security posture management platform will determine whether any saved payment account data is encrypted. By highlighting the security posture of sensitive data and providing proof for compliance audits, the platform’s cloud data catalogue, access privilege intelligence, and risk detection tools help with compliance tasks like these.
Automating Remediation for Data Security Posture Management
To automate remediation processes for data security posture management, organizations should follow these steps:
Identify the types of security threats that need to be remedied.
This includes defining the precise risks and vulnerabilities that must be addressed in order to maintain the organization’s security posture.
Create a plan for remediation.
After security threats have been identified, create a strategy for addressing them. Along with defining the actions that must be taken to handle each concern, this should also include ranking the threats according to their seriousness and potential impact.
Use automated technologies to help remediate security vulnerabilities in real time.
After the remediation strategy has been created, organizations can use automated tools. Platforms for security orchestration and automation, SIEM (security information and event management) systems, and security analytics tools are a few examples of these resources.
Monitor and evaluate the performance of remediation.
After installing automated remediation solutions, businesses should monitor and evaluate how well they work in identifying and addressing security problems. Regular security audits and assessments as well as continual monitoring of the organization’s security posture can accomplish this.
Benefits of Using Data Security Posture Management
The main advantage of data security posture management is that it makes it easier for your company to maintain the security of its cloud data over time. Comparing and addressing concerns affecting the overall cloud, apps, network, devices, identity, and other sorts of security posture is not the same as assessing and addressing data security posture. In contrast to this, data security posture management zeroes in on your data like a laser beam.
First, it finds sensitive data (both structured and unstructured), including shadow data stores and forgotten databases, in your cloud settings. Second, it helps you understand where the data came from and who had access to it, categorizes sensitive data, connects it to legal frameworks, and traces its history. This enables you to ascertain where and how much of the data is accessible. Finally, by balancing data sensitivity against identity, access, vulnerabilities, and configurations, it finds attack paths to sensitive data.
Key Capabilities of the Right Data Security Posture Management Platform
To put it simply, your data security posture management platform should automate the process of determining the security posture of your cloud data, identifying and mitigating risks, and assuring compliance. It is generally a good idea to find a data security posture management platform that is agentless and deploys natively on any of the major clouds.
Naturally, the platform should include role-based access control to maintain the same level of security for the administration of data as it does for sensitive data. All of these will reduce obstacles and boost data security posture management productivity for your teams.
Conclusion
In general, automating data security posture management remediation activities can assist organizations in maintaining a proactive approach to security, lowering the risk of data breaches and limiting the potential effect of security attacks. This article gives you a comprehensive look at the uses of data security posture management, a step-wise guide to automating it, the benefits of data security posture management, and a blueprint for finding the right data security posture management tool.
I hope you found this article useful in your journey to automating data security posture management.
Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com
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