It’s incredible how complex today’s IT environments have become. Among the central promises of cloud computing were simplified management and security. However, almost paradoxically, it is the ease of cloud deployment and use that led to an explosion of adoption that has presented a significant challenge for security teams.
The challenge isn’t necessarily just the number of cloud services in use but how scattered an organization’s data becomes across these services. It doesn’t seem too long ago when nearly all enterprise data was stored on local drives or shared storage in a data center. No more. With the rise in popularity of cloud services, files are likely to be stored on user endpoints as well as across a number of cloud services, including Box, Google Drive, OneDrive or collaboration platforms like Slack and others.
To add to the complexity, the research firm Gartner estimates that more than 80 percent of enterprise data is unstructured data, and most of that data is expected to be stored in cloud systems.
And, while this may be surprising — because it feels like cloud adoption has been ongoing for some time now — the reality is that the move to the cloud is still in its early stages. According to the market research firm Stratistics MRC, the global cloud storage market is expected to grow from its $19 billion market size in 2015 to more than $113 billion by 2022. That’s an annual growth rate of roughly 29 percent.
All of this compromises the ability of security teams to peer into the movement and location of the organization’s sensitive data. Security teams simply cannot monitor organizational data for changes or see where it travels. Security investigations become harrowing and require complex workflows with multiple tools to attempt to analyze potential security events — and forget about knowing for certain whether specific data files are backed up and recoverable.
These are questions security teams need to be able to answer — not only for security and regulatory compliance demands but to also ensure data availability for business.
Unfortunately, the rise in IT management complexity will continue to make for rising security challenges. And, let’s be honest, security technologies have not always made the jobs for security professionals easier.
Consider how difficult most security tools are to set up and manage. This is unfortunately the case when it comes to most prevailing security technologies: web application firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, encryption and so on. The same is true for traditional enterprise DLP.
The more complex the environment, the more challenging security becomes, and the more seamless to the workflow enterprise security managers must be.
This is why we made Code42 Next-Gen DLP straightforward to connect to cloud services and easy to use. Rather than being blinded by complexity, security teams can see where files are moving to and quickly scrutinize if something needs to be investigated. It provides a comprehensive view of file activity across both endpoints and cloud services.
Code42 Next-Gen DLP is designed to simplify investigatory workflows, shorten incident response time and help to reduce security and compliance risks.
In order to effectively manage cloud complexity, security teams need to be able to simplify their workflows — and do so regardless of the cloud services employees choose to use. After all, our IT environments aren’t going to get any easier to manage any time soon. We are creating more files, which are being stored in more cloud services, than ever before — and security threats and regulatory demands aren’t going to go away either. Your best defense is to ensure you have the necessary visibility to manage and secure your user data no matter where that data is being used and stored.