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Industry Insights

Zero Trust Starts with Data Security

Recently, I joined co-presenter Chase Cunningham from Forrester for a webinar titled, “Zero Trust starts with Data Security.” You can’t be in security and not have heard of Zero Trust. It’s become marketing fodder to a lot of folks, so our goal was to present a very real-world scenario of what was driving the Zero Trust movement. Recently, Code42 commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate challenges that organizations face using traditional data loss prevention solutions. They surveyed 200+ security budget decision makers in the U.S. at organizations with 1,000 to 4,999 employees.

Here is a summary of the key takeaways from the webinar: 

It’s war! 

Make no mistake, we are living in a warfighting domain in cyberspace. In fact, in 2010 the U.S. Department of Defense declared cyberspace a warfighting domain. Simply put, your business and its associated data is in the middle of a war zone.

Compliance is more than a checkbox!

You can be compliant or you can be secure. Often organizations that choose to just be compliant are still setting themselves up for major security breaches. The analogy Chase used to explain this idea in the webinar is reason enough to watch the replay.

DLP isn’t the second coming. Prevention isn’t enough.

There is plenty of market frustration about the current state of DLP. Users have essentially checked out and are recognizing that there is a critical protection layer missing from the security stack.

Insider threat is on the rise. 

Here’s a stat to ponder: Ninety percent of insider data loss, leak and theft goes undetected internally.

Departing employees are taking your data.

Fifty percent of the labor force is already looking for new employment, half of which have been with their current employer for less than a year. They are quitting at alarming rates, and they are taking your data when they go! 

Workflows don’t exist.

We asked a very simple question of today’s organizations: Do you have a departing employee workflow? While badge and device collection are standard HR protocols, we heard crickets when it came to “collecting the data.” Simply put, organizations do not have a process for protecting corporate data when employees leave. 

Data is no longer the core focus. Everything else is.

Solutions and training have shifted the focus away from the core problem of the “data” itself. Prevention-oriented solutions are so focused on policies, classification and blocking, etc., that they are ignoring data altogether, which is a critical element in the Zero Trust approach. 

Zero Trust is a timely reminder…

To focus on the data! 

All data matters

At the core of Zero Trust is an approach rooted in collecting all data, not culling it out. 

It’s about data loss protection 

You have to complement a prevention-focused approach with protection measures because ultimately it is imperative to reduce the time to detect, investigate and respond to a data breach. 

Follow the data, not the employee!

While it can be easy to get suckered into a “Big Brother” mindset of monitoring employee movement patterns, all you really need to do is understand data movement patterns. After all, it’s the data the employee is after! 

To dive into the details of this webinar some more, catch the entire on-demand version here.

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