Pandemic Continues to Deliver Data Security Challenges

Pandemic Continues to Deliver Data Security Challenges

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In Cloud, Data Protection, Data Security
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More Security, But at a Lower Cost

A recent survey by Microsoft of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) showed that, with the ongoing pandemic forcing remote work, ensuring secure and protected access to applications and data is their highest concern. Interestingly, the study revealed that 58% of the CISOs were increasing their security budgets, but at the same time, 81% felt pressure to lower security costs. This indicates to me that many CISOs believe their security needs to improve, but even more CISOs need to address the current business imperative to cut costs. These may seem to be contradictory results. Yet, it’s not a surprise when we know that today nearly every business is seeking to reduce costs while confronting escalating cyber security threats.

Less Complexity Means Better Security

At Teleran, we encounter these challenges daily with our corporate customers. The pandemic has served to accelerate trends that we have seen developing over the last couple of years. Our customers tell us that having to deploy different information security and protection systems across applications and data sets ‒ on premise, in hybrid and public cloud environments ‒ significantly increases the complexity, costs, and challenges of delivering adequate security. Security complexity continues to drive up costs and lower productivity, resulting in less effective security and protection.

Comprehensive, Consistent Data Security ‒ Across Applications and Data ‒ On Prem or in the Cloud

Teleran’s latest data security and protection solution is designed from the ground up to address the challenge of complexity and standardization across many different applications, data platforms and computing environments. In a nutshell, our solution discovers, audits, controls access to, and masks sensitive, regulated data in one integrated, fast to implement system. Because it is a comprehensive, integrated solution, there is no need to set up and manage different products on your various applications and across environments.

Automation Reduces Complexity and Cost

Teleran’s solution automatically generates and applies the appropriate data security and protection policies, reducing complexity, time, and cost to maintain the optimally effective controls as your usage patterns and threats change over time. And, critically, Teleran’s solution operates across applications and data platforms in the same way, whether your applications and databases operate in your data center, in public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google or Oracle) or in a hybrid environment.

Teleran Cloud Data Access Broker ‒ Because Data is the Target

A key ingredient that enables Teleran to deliver its data security capabilities across many applications and platforms is its patented data access broker. It operates as an agent or “sensor” on the network in front of data platforms where ever they reside. It efficiently performs a range of functions including auditing access to sensitive data, dynamically masking sensitive data, alerting staff to inappropriate or suspicious data activity, and allowing only authorized access to sensitive data. It does this without impeding authorized, appropriate business use of the data. Often “in-the-database” security functions consume resources and slow database performance and throughput. At the heart of Teleran’s broker is an expert system that learns and adapts policies over time based on changing threats and usage patterns. Again, the objective is to reduce complexity and cost through a consistent application as well as automation.

Closing Data Security Gaps

Most data platforms today, like Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, offer native masking or redaction solutions on premise and in the cloud. There are gaps in these offerings, however. One in particular is the inferencing problem. Today there are a wide variety of powerful data access and analysis tools available such as Power BI, Tableau and others. A malicious user can zero in on sensitive data that has been redacted or masked from the returned results but is not restricted as a search criterion. So, a user can progressively narrow down their search until the actual sensitive data is revealed. This is the inferencing problem. For example, if I queried a human resources database for CEO Bill Smith’s salary, I would launch a query: select Bill Smith, salary. Oracle will mask the return value for that salary for that individual. But I could ask for people with salaries between $100,000 and a million dollars and then, based on the results of that query, successively narrow down additional queries to eventually find that Bill Smith makes $650,300.

Native database masking is recommended for use with encoded applications, but not for use with ad hoc query tools. In fact, here’s what Oracle states in their documentation: “Oracle Data Redaction is not intended to protect against users who run ad hoc SQL queries that attempt to determine the actual values by inference.”  Teleran’s dynamic data masking can prohibit the masked or redacted column from being used as search criteria described above. Teleran’s solution easily plugs the inferencing loophole that many solutions leave wide open.

Simplifying, Automating and Standardizing Data Security

What we’ve learned from our customers is that simplifying, automating and standardizing data security  are critical factors in delivering on the business imperatives today: more effective, but cost-efficient data security.

Teleran Data Security and Protection

  • Discovers, audits, controls access to, and dynamically masks sensitive, regulated data in one integrated, fast to implement system
  • Provides consistent protection on-premise, hybrid and public cloud data environments
  • Closes inferencing and brute force gaps left open my most native database access controls and masking
  • Patented high speed data access broker audits, masks, protects, and alerts
  • Automatically creates the appropriate data access and dynamic data masking policies
  • Addresses all major data privacy regulations including PHI/HIPAA, PCI, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), GDPR

Click here to learn more about how Teleran can deliver the data security and protection you need today.

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